How To Create Provisioning Profile And Certificate In Ios

In order to distribute an app, there needs to be an individual, a group or company to claim ownership of it and that's where the Distribution Certificate and a Development Certificate will be needed. It's job is to authenticate and identify you as an individual or your team in a Distribution Profile to present your app to the app store.

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Development Profile

Now we're going to create a development provisioning profile.

You'll need a provisioning profile in order to release any content onto the Apple App Store. Addtional infomation on iOS Provisioning Profiles can be accessed here once you've signed in to your Apple Developer Account.

Login to your iOS Developer Portal then click on the Certificates, ID's & Profiles tab (this should be your favorite page by now!)

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Once you're there, scroll down to "Provisioning Profiles", then click on All

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Click the [+] button to the right of the Add iOS Provisioning Profiles title.

On the next page, you'll choose your type of provisioning profile. Under Development, select iOS App Development, then hit Continue.

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Next you'll be asked to select an App ID - choose the one you created in the previous step of this guide.

Now select your iOS Development Certificate which we created previously. Then hit Continue.

Next select your iOS device or devices which we registered earlier...

Now you'll need to choose a profile name. Something descriptive like - My App Distribution Profile should work. Next, hit Continue

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It will be created, all you have to do is Download it

Now just hit the download button, then your Development Provisioning Profile will be downloaded to your hard drive. Drag the downloaded file onto the Xcode's app icon to install it.

Well done! Just one more profile to go…

Distribution profile

To create your Distribution Provisioning Profile, follow the same steps as above but choose App Store Distribution as the profile type and name the profile as My App Distribution Profile. Remember, we need each type of profile to match its certificate.

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Go through the whole process including downloading and dragging the profile onto XCode

Once you have both your Development and Distribution provisioning profiles created, downloaded, and installed you're ready to move on to the next step.

This guide was first published on Aug 16, 2016. It was last updated on Aug 16, 2016.

This page (Creating Development & Distribution Provisioning Profiles) was last updated on Nov 22, 2021.

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