I finally got around to installing Snow Leopard on my MacBook Pro. I don’t believe in putting a new operating system on top of an old one, so I started over from scratch, on a brand-new hard drive. Which explains why I waited so long. Installing everything from scratch is torture.
A couple of days ago, I could no longer postpone reinstalling all the dev certs and crud you need to make iPhone apps that you can put on real iPhone hardware. As I was installling all that stuff, I encountered this interesting text from Apple’s developer website, concerning development certificates:
It is critical that you save your private key somewhere safe in the event that you need to develop on multiple computers or decide to reinstall your system OS. Without your private key, you will be unable to sign binaries in Xcode and test your application on any Apple device. When a CSR is generated, the Keychain Access application creates a private key on your login keychain. This private key is tied to your user account and cannot be reproduced if lost due to an OS reinstall. If you plan to do development and testing on multiple systems, you will need to import your private key onto all of the systems you’ll be doing work on.
Well! From the sound of that, you would be forgiven for thinking that, if you don’t back up your private key, you’ll be completely dead in the water, never to write another iPhone app again. That’s certainly what I thought when I was setting this stuff up the first time, about a year ago. So I did just what they told me to, and I backed it all up. I was reading somebody else’s blog recently that claimed the text quoted above was literally true. Which is why I’m writing today.
Actually, no. If you don’t back up that stuff, you won’t be dead in the water. I found my cert backups from a year ago, and tried to use them, but it was just too painful. Nothing about Apple’s iPhone code signing process makes much sense. When you get stuck, it’s best to just blow everything away and start over.
Which is just what I did! I removed everything from my keychain that had anything to do with iPhone development, I threw away all my provisioning profiles, and I started over from scratch. It went a lot easier this time. I think I’ve finally been doing this long enough to understand a few of the concepts.
From the sound of it, I think the only time you’d really need to follow Apple’s backup device is if you plan to use two or more Macs for iPhone development simultaneously. I’ve never needed to do that, so that’s one less thing to worry about.
