The last thing I wanted to do on a Sunday morning is write a blog post about an an Xcode executable problem. What I had planned to do is test my most recent Swift 2.0 SpriteKit game on my iPad and iPhone. Last night I got a “Identity used to sign the executable is no longer valid” error when attempting to run my code on a real device. Since it was around midnight I took the message a notification that bedtime had arrived. Besides, a quick search on StackOverflow would surely solve the problem and if I got on SO now I would be up all night nosing around.
This morning I got the same message and found a post on SO that started four years ago with two pages of answers: The identity used to sign the executable is no longer valid. It’s been viewed 66K times and covers many ancient versions of Xcode. The top answer simply said to restart Xcode. Indeed, restarting, rebooting, or re-installing is always a great answer! So I tried the first two (restarting Xcode and rebooting all my devices) but no joy. And it’s a cheap answer. 99% of computer problems are temporarily solved by powering down and up the server or device but the root cause sits like a malignant elf in the machine, biding it’s time, ready to strike again.
So I figured it out. My problem, in any case.
Last week I was giving a talk at SUNY Buffalo (shout out to Prof. Hartloff). It’s just far enough away from NYC that I had to stay overnight. I took a MacBook Pro that I don’t ordinarily use for development. When I was working on my new game and testing it my iPad and iPhone (to get actual frame rates and the feel of touching the screen) Xcode discovered that I didn’t have an iOS development certificate on that MacBook and asked me if I wanted to revoke my current cert or copy it over from another machine. Since I didn’t have it I said revoke. Xcode did what ever it does and created me a new iOS dev cert associated with that particular MacBook Pro.
Note to Apple: There has to be a better way for Apple certified developers to manage their certificates in this age of clouds and connectivity. Can’t these certs reside on Infinite Loop server?
Enough backstory!
If you get the dreaded “Identity used to sign executable no longer valid” error and restarting your Xcode doesn’t work here are the steps that should fix it for good.
Go to your Apple developer account certificate overview and read carefully and completely about how to manually manage certs and provision devices. Once you understand what you need to do it’s relatively simple.
- Revoke and delete all the could certs and profiles of devices you no longer own that have build up over the years. Clean it all up.
- Then, following the instructions from Apple recreate your iOS development and distribution certificates.
- Re-provision your iOS devices.
- Download your certs and provisioning files and reinstall them into your Mac’s keychain.
- Clean and build your app.
- Now it should run on the iOS devices you’ve provisioned nicely.
Note to You: Xcode is no longer managing your certs and profiles. But that’s OK. It was doing a bad job anyway.
Post Script
Why didn’t I post this info to Stack Overflow? Because this is a pretty radical solution, not without risk. SO, for better or worse, has been come the place for copy and paste solutions that have not aged gracefully over time. Don’t get me wrong–I love Stack Overflow, recommend it, and use it all the time. But sometimes it’s not safe to post an answer to a problem that requires reading comprehension.
Lucky for you and me, my unpopular blog post will probably be the last item in your search for solutions to apple certification problems.