Creating an Apple Provisioning Profile and a .p12 Certificate using OpenSSL

We don’t all have a Mac, you know…

Photo by Pereanu Sebastian on Unsplash

I recently discovered a convoluted way to build an iOS .ipa package without using a MacBook. It involves many steps, one of which is using OpenSSL to perform some actions you would normally need Keychain for. Instead of creating one huge blog post with all steps defined in detail, I decided to split them up in bite-size articles. This is one of them. Here I will teach you to do the following:

• Create a key and Certificate Signing Request (CSR)
• Use that CSR on the Apple Developer Console to get a .cer certificate
• Create an App ID for your app
• Register a device (for Ad Hoc distribution only)
• Use the .cer certificate to create a Provisioning Profile on the Apple Developer Console
• Use the same .cer certificate to create a .p12 certificate

Prerequisites

I’ve mentioned them above, but you will need two things to be able to follow along:

• OpenSSL (if you don’t have it or do not have it added to your PATH, read this article first)
• A paid Apple Developer account

If you have those, then let’s go!

Create a key and Certificate Signing Request

If you followed the OpenSSL article linked above, you should be able to choose a directory where you want to run the following commands. So open up a Command Prompt as Administrator at the location you want and let’s get started.

• Create a key file by running the following command (you can give it any name you want, as long as it ends with .key):

openssl genrsa -out bjarke.key 2048

Now you have a .key file

• Create a CSR by running the following command, replacing the keyfile name with your own and changing the credentials at the end (The NL is a country code, you would choose your own, for instance US if you’re from the United States):