Managing Certificates and Provisioning - Xcode 4 - page 243

Personal developer details: These files are called certificates or identities. They match an identity in
your Mac's keychain, allowing Xcode to confirm that you are who you claim to be, and that you have the
privileges needed to test apps on devices or upload them to the App Store.
Device details: These files are called profiles. They allow a device to run test apps signed by a given de-
veloper.
Both certificates and profiles are files with embedded digital keys. The provisioning process would be much
simpler if the files were created and installed in a standard way. Unfortunately, they aren't. Certificates are in-
stalled in your personal login keychain. Profiles are managed in Xcode. Both are created on the Provisioning
Portal, but they need different and unrelated user input.
You can work through the provisioning process in two ways:
Manually: The Apple developer website includes a profile manager area called the iOS Provisioning
Portal, shown in Figure 11.1 . To create provisioning files, you must upload information—such as a unique
user key and various device identifier codes—to the portal. The portal generates the required files. You can
then download them from the portal and install them in Xcode or in your keychain, as needed.
Automatically: The device provisioning process has been automated in Xcode 4. Personal setup is still
manual, but the part that manages test devices has been simplified. It can be as simple as a one-click opera-
tion.
This chapter introduces manual provisioning in detail, so you can work through the initial setup process and
understand the requirements and options. Automated provisioning is described toward the end of the chapter.
You can develop apps for the iOS Simulator and for OS X without provisioning. You can also (for the time be-
ing) sell OS X apps independently of the App Store. But if you don't set up provisioning, you can't test apps on
your own iOS hardware.
Note that even with provisioning, permissions are time-limited. After permissions expire, apps built for hard-
ware testing stop working. You can renew their permissions only with a valid developer subscription. This
means that any apps you create stop working after a time, unless you're a registered developer. To use your own
apps indefinitely, you must upload them to the app store, have them accepted, give yourself a free gift certific-
ate, and then “buy” the app with the certificate.
CROSS-REFERENCE
This chapter explains how to generate, download, and install the files used by the provisioning process. You need
to make some changes to a project's build settings before you use these files to distribute projects, and this pro-
cess is described in detail in Chapter 12. Don't try to submit your projects to the App Store until you've worked
through that chapter.
FIGURE 11.1
A first look at the iOS Provisioning Portal