OT: How to renew iOS Certificates?

[Graham Samuel]

Thanks to both Dave and to Chris who wrote earlier. Given the agony that one has to go through, I am a bit surprised that nobody has yet replied with a snappy step-by-step guide. I chose LiveCode and other x-talks to be able to get straight to the point of creating stuff, and this kind of bureaucracy sure gets in the way of that.

At the moment I have a couple of days before my iOS Team Provisioning Profile expires (or maybe that should be a plural? There seem to be three of them attached to my iPad). I have been in touch with Apple's European Support people, who are very nice and quite responsive, but so far they have not removed all of my confusion. I am feeling my way, but some things I am still queasy about include:

1. The need to work using both XCode and the iOS Provisioning Portal (which is essentially a web site). It's not clear to me why I can't just manage everything in XCode but it seems I can't.

2. There are some actual wrong instructions as far as i can see, particularly in XCode Organizer where there is a 'renew' button when you display a profile which is about to expire  on a device, but clicking on it doesn't do anything, not AFAIKS anyway!

3. The jargon and the underlying model of digital signing and so on, which I find very very difficult. For example the word 'Certificate' is used on the web site but not (I think) in XCode; in XCode there seems to be only one type of object, a Provisioning Profile, but I have a feeling they come in different flavours, tho as this is not explicit, I'm not sure. There are distribution profiles too: I thought I had an Ad Hoc one, but I haven't found out what happened to it. I feel that there's a game with lots of rules, but all attempts to explain the rules are somehow lost on me. It doesn't help that I find the Apple documentation convoluted and very boring, like your least favourite subject at university.

Anyway thanks again for the help so far. If I get out of the wood (and I certainly hope to do so soon), I'll try to report back to the list.

Graham

On 5 Jan 2013, at 12:51, Dave Kilroy wrote:

> Hi Graham
> 
> Yep you need to be careful with iOS developer and distribution certificates - mostly because you have almost no control over them Apple controls them and if something goes wrong you are at their mercy - it went wrong for me and now I can't sign code or build for iOS devices and am constrained to the simulator.
> 
> You can (I think the word is 'rescind') your developer and distribution certificates at the Provisioning Portal and get Apple to create new ones for you - although as Chris says it's easier if you let Xcode do this for you.
> 
> When my developer certificate was expiring I must have done something Apple didn't like because I ended up with two developer certificates, which throws an error and stops me building standalones for iOS
> 
> The best info I found on the process is Apple's Technical Note TN2250 - but with any luck if you instead read Apple's guides with more insight than I you will sail through the process.
> 
> BTW - for those who are interested, I don't have an extra developer certificate in my keychain, nor in the preferences folder of Xcode, nor anywhere I can find on my machine - the naughty extra certificate gets imported from the Provisioning Profile each time I get Xcode to refresh. <sigh> and I've been phoning the WorldWide Apple Developer Center since 23rd November (apparently engineers in Cupertino have looked at my problem and don't know how to fix it)
> 
> So good luck but be careful!
> 
> Dave
> 
> 
> 
>> I am probably not alone in finding the whole business of administering the iOS development process a bit of a nightmare - a nightmare set in a jungle, perhaps. The thing is, I develop alone, at my own pace, and I don't always remember the way Apple does things.
>> 
>> Now I find that two certificates I need - a Development Certificate and a Distribution Certificate - are about to expire, in a couple of days in fact. My Developer subscription isn't up until April, so all I want to do is to renew the certificates, but so far I can't find out how to do it. I feel I have searched the iOS Developer's documentation jungle pretty thoroughly, but I haven't found any kind of step-by-step guide. I have a vague feeling that what one has to do is just to let these ones go and create new ones, but I haven't (yet) found any text saying so, and I don't know where this notion came from.
>> 
>> Could someone very kindly give me some insight into this? And if they're feeling very generous, perhaps that same person could say what version of XCode I should be using with LC 5.5.3. At the moment I'm using 4.5.1 and it works, but there's a newer version, isn't there?
>> 
>> Thanks to anyone who replies.
>> 
>> Graham
> 
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