Every time I think that I have things sorted for the build process of my applications, sure enough, Apple find some way to mess it up. This time it’s the fact that the certificate and provisioning profile I’m using in my fully automated build and release pipeline has expired. Of course, this would be for a pipeline that I haven’t run for 6 months – it’s very frustrating that I can’t just come back and run the pipeline without something going wrong.
Considering I have a fairly well established CI/CD pipeline (thanks to Pipeline Templates), the main issue I have now is that I’ve completely forgotten how the stupid iOS certificates and provisioning profiles work. Luckily, I’ve been down this path before and have a well documented set of steps to create the bits I need without touching a Mac!!!
If you’re setting up a new build process, or, like me, having to update expired certificates and provisioning profiles, I’d suggest checking out this blog post, Pipeline Templates: Building and Deploying Uno Apps for iOS, Android and Windows.
If you’re part of the Apple Enterprise program, you also have an Enterprise Distribution certificate that allows you to deploy apps within your enterprise. We just when you think you finally understand how the certs, identifiers, provision profiles all work together, something happens.