[ios] How to re-sign the ipa file?

How do I sign the .ipa file with a provisioning profile after I generate an IPA like the following with a different provision profile? I would like to sign the IPA with an ad-hoc provisioning profile for beta testing, and then re-sign the exact IPA with an app submission provisioning profile for the app store.

/usr/bin/xcrun -sdk iphoneos PackageApplication -v "${RELEASE_BUILDDIR}/${APPLICATION_NAME}.app" -o "${BUILD_HISTORY_DIR}/${APPLICATION_NAME}.ipa" --sign "${DEVELOPER_NAME}" --embed "${PROVISONING_PROFILE}"

This question is related to ios ios-provisioning ipa

The answer is


Kind of old question, but with the latest XCode, codesign is easy:

$ codesign -s my_certificate example.ipa 

$ codesign -vv example.ipa
example.ipa: valid on disk
example.ipa: satisfies its Designated Requirement

It's really easy to do from the command line. I had a gist of a script for doing this. It has now been incorporated into the ipa_sign script in https://github.com/RichardBronosky/ota-tools which I use daily. If you have any questions about using these tools, don't hesitate to ask.

The heart of it is this:

CODESIGN_ALLOCATE=`xcrun --find codesign_allocate`; export CODESIGN_ALLOCATE
IPA="/path/to/file.ipa"
PROVISION="/path/to/file.mobileprovision"
CERTIFICATE="Name of certificate: To sign with" # must be in keychain
# unzip the ipa
unzip -q "$IPA"
# remove the signature
rm -rf Payload/*.app/_CodeSignature
# replace the provision
cp "$PROVISION" Payload/*.app/embedded.mobileprovision
# sign with the new certificate (--resource-rules has been deprecated OS X Yosemite (10.10), it can safely be removed)
/usr/bin/codesign -f -s "$CERTIFICATE" Payload/*.app
# zip it back up
zip -qr resigned.ipa Payload

Your new signed app is called resigned.ipa


  1. Unzip the .ipa file by changing its extension with .zip
  2. Go to Payload. You will find .app file
  3. Right click the .app file and click Show package contents
  4. Delete the _CodeSigned folder
  5. Replace the embedded.mobileprovision file with the new provision profile
  6. Go to KeyChain Access and make sure the certificate associated with the provisional profile is present
  7. Execute the below mentioned command: /usr/bin/codesign -f -s "iPhone Distribution: Certificate Name" --resource-rules "Payload/Application.app/ResourceRules.plist" "Payload/Application.app"

  8. Now zip the Payload folder again and change the .zip extension with .ipa

Hope this helpful.

For reference follow below mentioned link: http://www.modelmetrics.com/tomgersic/codesign-re-signing-an-ipa-between-apple-accounts/


Try this app http://www.ketzler.de/2011/01/resign-an-iphone-app-insert-new-bundle-id-and-send-to-xcode-organizer-for-upload/

It supposed to help you resign the IPA file. I tried it myself but couldn't get pass an error with Entitlements.plist. Could just be a problem with my project. You should give it a try.


Check iResign for an easy tool on how to do this!

[edit] after some fudling around, I found a solution to keychain-aware resigning. You can check it out at https://gist.github.com/Weptun/5406993


Fastlane's sigh provides a fairly robust solution for resigning IPAs.

From their README:

Resign

If you generated your ipa file but want to apply a different code signing onto the ipa file, you can use sigh resign:

fastlane sigh resign

sigh will find the ipa file and the provisioning profile for you if they are located in the current folder.

You can pass more information using the command line:

fastlane sigh resign ./path/app.ipa --signing_identity "iPhone Distribution: Felix Krause" -p "my.mobileprovision"

It will even handle provisioning profiles for nested applications (eg. if you have watchkit apps)


The answers posted here all didn't quite work for me. They mainly skipped signing embedded frameworks (or including the entitlements).

Here's what's worked for me (it assumes that one ipa file exists is in the current directory):

PROVISION="/path/to/file.mobileprovision"
CERTIFICATE="Name of certificate: To sign with" # must be in the keychain

unzip -q *.ipa
rm -rf Payload/*.app/_CodeSignature/

# Replace embedded provisioning profile
cp "$PROVISION" Payload/*.app/embedded.mobileprovision

# Extract entitlements from app
codesign -d --entitlements :entitlements.plist Payload/*.app/

# Re-sign embedded frameworks
codesign -f -s "$CERTIFICATE" --entitlements entitlements.plist Payload/*.app/Frameworks/*

# Re-sign the app (with entitlements)
codesign -f -s "$CERTIFICATE" --entitlements entitlements.plist Payload/*.app/

zip -qr resigned.ipa Payload

# Cleanup
rm entitlements.plist
rm -r Payload/

I've updated Bryan's code for my Sierra iMac:

# this version was tested OK vith macOs Sierra 10.12.5 (16F73) on oct 0th, 2017
# original ipa file must be store in current working directory 

IPA="ipa-filename.ipa"
PROVISION="path-to.mobileprovision"
CERTIFICATE="hexadecimal-certificate-identifier" # must be in keychain
# identifier maybe retrieved by running: security find-identity -v -p codesigning

# unzip the ipa
unzip -q "$IPA"

# remove the signature
rm -rf Payload/*.app/_CodeSignature

# replace the provision
cp "$PROVISION" Payload/*.app/embedded.mobileprovision

# generate entitlements for current app
cd Payload/
codesign -d --entitlements - *.app > entitlements.plist
cd ..
mv Payload/entitlements.plist entitlements.plist

# sign with the new certificate and entitlements
/usr/bin/codesign -f -s "$CERTIFICATE" '--entitlements' 'entitlements.plist'  Payload/*.app

# zip it back up
zip -qr resigned.ipa Payload