And Mac's Catalina OS released in Oct. 2019 added a number of changes impacting sandboxed apps, causing many existing Electron apps to crash and new apps to be rejected. Below are the steps you need to take to get a basic app successfully submitted for review and approved for distribution on the Mac App Store.

Code signing your app assures users that it is from a known source and the app hasn’t been modified since it was last signed. Before your app can integrate app services, be installed on a device, or be submitted to the App Store, it must be signed with a certificate issued by Apple. For more information on how to request certificates and code sign your apps, review Xcode Help.

Common Tasks

To avoid potential issues with common tasks involving code signing, follow these best practices:

Signing and Running Development Builds

Beta Testing

Distribution

Essential Guides and Documentation

Frequently Asked Questions

• How do I transfer my code signing certificates and provisioning profiles to another Mac?

  Review the instructions in Export signing certificates and provisioning profiles.

• What does “Valid Signing Identity Not Found” mean and how do I resolve it?

  Follow the steps outlined in If a signing certificate or private key is missing.

• How do I resolve a code signing build error?

  See the list of published solutions in If a code signing error occurs.

• How do I revoke or delete my certificates and start over?

  Use the process outlined in View or remove a signing certificate in your keychain.

• Do I need to define a custom Code Signing Entitlements file in Xcode?

  To understand when entitlements are required and how to configure them properly, see Add a capability to a target.

Apple Developer Forum Discussions

macOS and Windows code signing is supported. Windows is dual code-signed (SHA1 & SHA256 hashing algorithms).

On a macOS development machine, a valid and appropriate identity from your keychain will be automatically used.

Tip

Mac invalid checksum dmg files. The program will then checksum to see if the sum is what is really in the image. If it is off, it reports 'invalid checksum' If you downloaded it from a website, it likely was corrupted during download, and I would suggest trying to download it again. If you downloaded it from a peer to peer network, the file may be a fake.

See article Notarizing your Electron application.

Tip

If you are building Windows on macOS and need to set a different certificate and password (than the ones set in CSC_* env vars) you can use WIN_CSC_LINK and WIN_CSC_KEY_PASSWORD.

Windows¶

To sign an app on Windows, there are two types of certificates:

• EV Code Signing Certificate
• Code Signing Certificate

Both certificates work with auto-update. The regular (and often cheaper) Code Signing Certificate shows a warning during installation that goes away once enough users installed your application and you’ve built up trust. The EV Certificate has more trust and thus works immediately without any warnings. However, it is not possible to export the EV Certificate as it is bound to a physical USB dongle. Thus, you can’t export the certificate for signing code on a CI, such as AppVeyor.

If you are using an EV Certificate, you need to provide win.certificateSubjectName in your electron-builder configuration.

If you use Windows 7, please ensure that PowerShell is updated to version 3.0.

If you are on Linux or Mac and you want sign a Windows app using EV Code Signing Certificate, please use the guide for Unix systems.

Travis, AppVeyor and other CI Servers¶

To sign app on build server you need to set CSC_LINK, CSC_KEY_PASSWORD:

1. Export certificate. Consider to not use special characters (for bash[1]) in the password because “values are not escaped when your builds are executed”.
2. Encode file to base64 (macOS: base64 -i yourFile.p12 -o envValue.txt, Linux: base64 yourFile.p12 > envValue.txt).

Or upload *.p12 file (e.g. on Google Drive, use direct link generator to get correct download link).

1. Set CSC_LINK and CSC_KEY_PASSWORD environment variables. See Travis or AppVeyor documentation. Recommended to set it in the CI Project Settings, not in the .travis.yml/appveyor.yml. If you use link to file (not base64 encoded data), make sure to escape special characters (for bash[1]) accordingly.

In case of AppVeyor, don’t forget to click on lock icon to “Toggle variable encryption”.

Keep in mind that Windows is not able to handle enviroment variable values longer than 8192 characters, thus if the base64 representation of your certificate exceeds that limit, try re-exporting the certificate without including all the certificates in the certification path (they are not necessary, but the Certificate Manager export wizard ticks the option by default), otherwise the encoded value will be truncated.

[1] printf '%qn' '<url>'

Where to Buy Code Signing Certificate¶

See Get a code signing certificate for Windows (platform: “Microsoft Authenticode”).Please note — Gatekeeper only recognises Apple digital certificates.

How to Export Certificate on macOS¶

1. Open Keychain.
2. Select login keychain, and My Certificates category.
3. Select all required certificates (hint: use cmd-click to select several):
4. Developer ID Application: to sign app for macOS.
5. 3rd Party Mac Developer Application: and 3rd Party Mac Developer Installer: to sign app for MAS (Mac App Store).
6. Developer ID Application: and Developer ID Installer to sign app and installer for distribution outside of the Mac App Store.
7. Mac Developer: to sign development builds for testing Mac App Store submissions (mas-dev target). You also need a provisioning profile in the working directory that matches this certificate and the device being used for testing.

Please note – you can select as many certificates as needed. No restrictions on electron-builder side. All selected certificates will be imported into temporary keychain on CI server.4. Open context menu and Export.

How to Disable Code Signing During the Build Process on macOS¶

To disable Code Signing when building for macOS leave all the above vars unset except for CSC_IDENTITY_AUTO_DISCOVERY which needs to be set to false. This can be done by running export CSC_IDENTITY_AUTO_DISCOVERY=false.

Another way — set mac.identity to null. You can pass aditional configuration using CLI as well: -c.mac.identity=null.