iOS App Development

How To Transfer XCode Certificates Between Macs

Transferring your iOS developer account to your new mac can often be a pain. If you have all the certificates and profiles on your mac, it will be a lot easier as Xcode has built-in features. If you don’t then there is a few extra steps but after reading this it should be pretty simple to understand.

Transferring Between Macs

Open Xcode and go to Organiser. Select your team or developer profile on the left toolbar.

Click export at the bottom.

Type in a useful filename then press save.

Open your new mac and open Xcode -> Organiser . Then press import. Find the file you saved and then press open.

Transferring Without Mac

If you haven’t got the mac or lost the files. You can still transfer your files across but it means having to remake them all.

Apple doesn’t like people having certificates on multiple machines but as long as your not using this for multiple developers you should be fine (no guarantees :P). I have done all this and got it working with distribution certificates. I’m not sure it will work with development as well (it should do though).

The first step is to delete your current certificate. You can do this by selecting the revoke command in provisioning profile.

You can then create a new certificate going through the step-by-step process to sign it to your machine.

You can use all the same App ID’s for the provisioning profiles. You will have to delete the profiles and then remake them all with same settings.

Once you’ve remade all the provisioning profiles go to Xcode -> Organiser. Go to provisioning profiles and press refresh to get all the latest profiles from your account. Once done it should have all the profiles. You will probably have to replace the profiles with the latest ones on your devices as well.

After this you can start developing again without any worries.

About the author

Chris

I've been a passionate evangelist for Apple and the Macintosh throughout my working life, my first love was a Quadra 605 working with a small creative agency in the south of Norfolk UK in the mid 1990's, I later progressed to other roles in other Macintosh dominated industries, first as a Senior graphic designer at a small printing company and then a production manager at Guardian Media Group. As the publishing and printing sector wained I moved into Internet Marketing and in 2006 co-founded blurtit.com which grew to become one the top 200 visited sites in the US (according to Quantcast), at its peak receiving over 15 million visits per month. For the last ten years I have worked as an Affiliate and Consultant to many different business and start ups, my key skill set being online marketing, on page monetisation, landing page optimisation and traffic generation, if you would like to hire me or discuss your current project please reach out to me here.

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