• • • • • • • • After too many hours spent on preparing a for publishing in I think I have a useful recipe that this article intends to share. If you are TL;DRing and just want a signing sequence that is known to work, check The enclosing folder is the sample app; it includes the necessary entitlement files, but does not include the provisioning profiles that you will have to obtain using your Apple developer account. This article is not intended to be a complete documentation of Electron packaging tools (electron-packager, electron-osx-sign, electron-osx-flat). They have official documentation for that. I just want to clarify some pitfalls related to MacOS packaging.

Darwin and MAS packaging MacOS applications can be packaged in two flavors: Darwin and MAS ('Mac App Store'). The MAS format is newer, and it is (obviously) intended for distribution via App Store. MAS apps are also sandboxed (more about this later). Apps from the Store are the most trusted. Only MAS apps run straight out-of-the-box without complaints, but you can configure security to trust properly signed Darwin apps as well. Figure 1: System Preferences, configuration of security regarding signed and MAS apps Unsigned apps won't run right away in recent versions of MacOS. The user needs to authorize every individual app in the System Preferences panel shown above.

(A useful trick is to Option-click the unsigned app: a dialog gives the option of authorizing it, just like it used to be in older versions of OS X.) So, as a developer, you have three ways to distribute your app: MAS, signed Darwin, and unsigned Darwin. I don't recommend wide distribution of unsigned apps due to security risks. But, if you simply don't want to deal with app signing, you use the electron-packager tool and nothing more.

Can somebody please tell me the instructions for using a custom icon, when compiling an electron app (on mac) when using electron-forge package? Using --icon gives me an error: error: unknown opti. Building an Electron app for the Windows target platform requires editing the Electron.exe file. Currently, Electron Packager uses node-rcedit to accomplish this. Can steam games i bought for mac be downloaded for pc windows 7. A Windows executable is bundled in that Node package and needs to be run in order for this functionality to work, so on non-Windows host platforms, Wine 1.6.

You may want to read the next three sections of this article, and you are good to go. In order to sign a MAS or Darwin package, you need a developer certificate signed by Apple, and to get it you need to enroll the Apple Developer Program, which costs US$ 99/year. This is why there still are so many unsigned apps out there. At least the US$ 99 fee buys you access to both iOS and MacOS; in the past, you'd have to play $99 for each platform! Command-line development tools In order to generate a MacOS package, you need Xcode installed, as well as Xcode command-line tools, since Electron builds are carried out outside of the IDE: xcode-select --install MacOS icon format The application icon is one of the dustiest corners of every platform, I guess. Windows still uses the ICO format, and Mac demands icons in a certain ICNS format, that most graphical tools cannot generate.

ICNS is actually a bundle of images, typically the same icon scaled down to varying sizes. There are online tools, free and paid, that generate the ICNS icon to be supplied to electron-packager in order to replace the default Electron icon. But no external tool is actually necessary. Check It takes the original icon (that should be of 1024x1024 size) and creates the ICNS icon. The script only uses CLI development tools. Certificates Wnen you enroll the Developer Program, you can request the certificates manually (creating a certificate request CSR using Keychain, uploading the CSR to developer.apple.com, etc.) but it is much, much easier to let Xcode do it for you. Figure 2: Xcode tool showing the developer certificates and provisioning profiles There are five certificates, or identities, related to Mac app signing: Development certificate: allows to run a signed (and, if MAS, sandboxed) app on your own machine, and also on other development/testing machines registered at developer.apple.com.