Apple Certificates: Renewing Certificates

The other annual Apple Developer event - Renewing Distribution and Developer Certificates.

I recently posted a quick tip for renewing Apple certificates, including development and distribution. This guide is meant to expand on that by covering these topics:

• Creating certificates in Xcode

• Signing and exporting certificates

Before we jump in

• If you have an app on the App Store, don’t worry - your current apps will not be affected when the certificate used to sign it expires.

• Apple limits a team to only 2 distribution certificates - this allows you to create a new one to replace the old.

• If you’re managing your provisioning profiles manually, you might consider moving to automatic signing to make your live simpler

Creating Certificates in Xcode

Xcode makes it tremendously easy to manage certificates. Here’s a step-by-step:

• Open Xcode

• Open Xcode Settings: ⌘ + ,

• Go to Accounts tab

• Find the appropriate Apple ID and Team

• Select Manage Certificates… button

• Select the + button in the bottom left

• Choose the Certificate type

  • This generates a private key and certificate

  • You can view these in Keychain Access app

    

Exporting Certificates

Regardless of how you generated the certificate, here’s how you export it to a .p12.

• In Keychain Access app you can do this by

  • Searching for the term distribution or development depending on the type of certificate you’re after

  • Select the private key and the certificate, right click and select Export 2 items

  • You can now export it as a P12 file

    

All done!

This is one of those processes that Apple Developers often do every year, and every year it comes around it feels new and dangerous, but it’s very straightforward thanks to Xcode.