Xcode iOS Mobile Development Distribution Development Certificate Tutorial
We’re not sure where today’s “Xcode iOS Mobile Development Distribution Development Certificate” topic fits into one of exactly …
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? Sometimes, as you are in Xcode developing Swift or Objective-C code you are attending to the “Development” aspects to the Signing Certificates you need from Apple to develop and distribute iOS mobile applications that eventually end up at the Apple App Store. But when it comes to the “Distribution” certificates, we were emailed by Apple that ours was going to expire within the next month.
With such matters, we prefer to deal with these matters there and then, and that is why we are writing this blog posting, because it is not a thing that can be done with a single click of a link … though the process starts that way. So what is involved with what amounts to “Requesting a New iOS Distribution Certificate for Use with Xcode” to solve this issue now, rather than rushing it in a month’s time … or forgetting to do it?
- Click/touch the link on the Apple email “Certificates, Identifiers and Profiles” … takes you to an …
- Apple Developer login screen asks for your Apple ID credentials … and then takes you to the …
- Certificates, Identifiers and Profiles webpage of the Apple Developer website makes it apparent that our …
- iOS Development certificate will expire on March 5, 2019 … not as much of a worry as …
- iOS Distribution certificate will expire on June 14, 2018 … so we …
- Click/touch the “Production” link on the (left hand side) “Certificates” menu … and then …
- Select the “App Store and Ad Hoc” radio button in the “Production” section (not the “Development” section) on the right hand side … then …
- Click/touch “Continue” button
- Now we are at the “Request” tab (2 of 4) in a web page called “About Creating a Certificate Signing Request (CSR)” … the instructions of which will get you to …
- Open “Keychain Access” application … and select …
- Keychain Access (menu) -> Certificate Assistant -> Request a Certificate from a Certificate Authority… … and as advised previously …
- Fill in “User email address” (but skip the “CA email address”) and choose the “Saved to disk” radio button … before …
- Click/touch “Continue” button
- Gets you saving that CSR to a file on your computer … asked for by …
- Now we are at the “Generate” tab (3 of 4) in a web page called “Generate your certificate” with a “Choose file” button … then we find that file last referenced to …
- Click/touch the “Open” button
- Click/touch “Continue” button
- Now we are at the “Download” tab (4 of 4) in a web page called “Your certificate is ready” … and we …
- Click/touch “Download” button
- Double click the downloaded ‘ios_distribution.cer’ certificate file … which brings back into play …
- “Keychain Access” application displays a dialog box “Do you want to add the certificate(s) from the file ‘ios_distribution.cer’ to a keychain?” … and we …
- Click/touch “Add” button … so that… voila … when we, now, open the …
- Certificates, Identifiers and Profiles webpage of the Apple Developer website makes it apparent that our …
- iOS Development certificate will expire on March 5, 2019 … not as much of a worry as …
- iOS Distribution certificate will expire on June 14, 2018 … but there is also one extending to …
- iOS Distribution certificate will expire on May 17, 2019 … yay!!!!!
The upshot of this is that Xcode iOS development as …
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- Middle Game
- End Game
… work will not be hampered by the threat of expired certificates, for a while, as will …
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… distribution of those apps to the App Store not be hampered by the threat of expired certificates, at least for a while.
You can see us doing this with this PDF slideshow presentation.
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