Removing Proxmox Popup

2025-07-27

The free and open source hypervisor

While rebuilding my homelab this weekend I was really annoyed by a little quirk of proxmox. You see proxmox is the hypervisor of choice for a lot of people because it is free for testing or personnal use and most importently it is open source. It is very good software and for most homelabers it will give you entreprise grade software for free.

Or is it ?

At install time you will see it immediatly, the pop up that no-one asked for :

Proxmox invalid subscription key popup

For a long time now people have been using proxmox at home without paying for a license and I mean they are right. Proxmox pricing is very good but if this is just a hobby you don’t have the money for this.

While I am very grateful for the service provided and the contributions of the Proxmox’s team to open source I really don’t like the stance they have on this question. When encoutering this pop up you might ask yourself ? Everyone told me Proxmox is free to use why is it bothering me at every log in that I should have a valid key ?

And then you might get curious and search on the Proxmox official forums and see a wide variety of post relating to your situation. At this point you might start to notice that every thread about this is immediatly either taken down because it is either giving away how to get rid of it or asking nicely for a less annoying option.

The thing is you are already paying with your time and your testing of their non entreprise repository. This is not accounting the number of walking ads for Proxmox that are members of the homelab subreddit. There should be an easy way to get out of this.

How to remove it

Into the heart of the matter now, this is easy way to circumvent it :

First we do a little backup of this javascript file we are going to modify

cp /usr/share/javascript/proxmox-widget-toolkit/proxmoxlib.js \
/usr/share/javascript/proxmox-widget-toolkit/proxmoxlib.js.backup

Then we edit it with vim

vim /usr/share/javascript/proxmox-widget-toolkit/proxmoxlib.js

Now we look for the line to modifiy in the file using / and the following string to search :
```
.data.status.toLowerCase() !== 'active'
```
We press i to enter insert mode and change the condition so that the line looks like this :
```
.data.status.toLowerCase() === 'active'
```
Pressing the Escape key will put you in “Normal” mode again and :wq will write the changes and quit the editor
And to wrap it up we restart the service for the web ui
```
systemctl restart pveproxy.service
```

And if it goes further ?

If they make it harder in the next releases then once again a company’s interest over a very good open source product will have prevailed. I will not go further than deactivate their warning by trying to produce a fake key or any other magic tricks. If they don’t want hobbyists it’s fair game I won’t push if further. I will go back to long proven Debian where there is no company to take over. The ease of use of proxmox won’t be worth the hassle compared to the stability, simplicity and freedom of the Debian system it is built on.

Final piece of info

This modification might need to be done after every upgrade so you can already bookmark this post ^^