Code signing tool : check your provisioning profiles

Signing an application to make it run on a physical device or to distribute to clients may be a real pain for iOS developers. With experience you get a clearer picture of how this works. The tool I'm presenting here helps you get a better understanding at provisioning profiles and it has become essential to me over the past two years when a lot of my time went to delivery and project configuration.

This is an open source project hosted on GitHub with the latest release being available here.

It works as a Quicklook plugin and allows you to visualize the content of a provisioning profile simply by pressing space on the file in the finder.

It gives you basically all the information contained in a provisioning profile from the name/ID of the application to the creation / expiration dates including the list of devices allowed, the type of profile and the names and expiration dates of the certificates related to it. This way you can quickly know if a developer or device is included to the profile you have on your machine without having to explore the Apple Developer Portal. Used in combination with Apple Keychain application, it will give you a way to be sure your signing material is OK and your profile is matching your certificate/device duo.

As a reminder, to get the list of all profiles known to XCode, you can go to XCode > Preferences > Account , click on your team and "View details". You can download here any missing profile and then check it with the plugin : right-click and "Show in finder" on any line in the list. XCode will normally take you to this folder :

/Users/&ltusername&gt/Library/MobileDevice/Provisioning Profiles

Another interesting feature : the preview of a .ipa and .xcarchive displays the information about their embedded profile giving you a way to check the binary your intern just created is correctly signed before sending it to the client ;)

With iOS 10, XCode team seems to have done a lot of work to better integrate the signing process to our IDE. However I have the feeling this little Quicklook plugin may still be useful to many of us :)