Good Morning
I hope everyone is well and staying safe. This is a wacky world that we navigate…
While I’m not a programmer, I have been tasked with signing and notarizing some OS X Desktop apps. written in XOJO. I understand that App Wrapper is a helpful tool to accomplish this but I find the instructions most incomplete and again, as a non-coder, simply foreign.
Is the comprehensive and complete set of step by step instructions to accomplish the task of signing and notarizing apps with Apple.
To do this you need a developer account with Apple, and yes, AppWrapper makes the job easier so best buy that.
Do you have a developer account at Apple yet?
Once you do, there are certificates to be downloaded from their site, and installed on your mac.
There is blood and sweat and tears in front of you even if you are a developer. The best way to handle notarisation is as part of building the app. Giving the task to a non-developer doesn’t make much sense.
As Jeff states, once you have your developer account (yes, it is required, not suggested), App Wrapper removes all of the minutiae from this process. I’m not sure how it’s functionality can be considered incomplete and foreign - Drag and drop the app, fill in the blanks, click Wrap - Signed, packaged, and notarized. In fact, I also use App Wrapper for a couple of non-Xojo apps. If only everything that we did in life were that easy
Otherwise, your gold standard is the Xcode documentation.
All the stuff in App Wrapper that looks foreign is going to be several orders of magnitude more so doing the work without it. Yes there are a huge number of options and permissions and requirements and all sorts of things that may or may not apply, but those come from Apple and youll find the documentation of it there. Though their documentation is difficult to follow as well to say the least. Thats not App Wrappers fault.
I would try with the default settings and if things dont work Id go looking for more info on the specific error messages on Apples developer site. The whole thing is a freaking nightmare as far as Im concerned. App Wrapper is the only reason I havent been incarcerated at a hospital for the mentally insane, or at least the only reason I can still develop for macOS at all.
Just to back up the comments here, Ive automated the process without AppWrapper. Ive done it entirely in bash scripting. It is a complicated task even for those with experience. Learn to use AppWrappers options, or I can confidently say you will never achieve your goal.
