iOS 7 Programming Cookbook

23.5. Signing Passes Digitally

Problem

You have prepared your pass folder with the manifest and the pass.json and all the images, and now you want to be able to digitally sign the pass folder and its content to create your pass file, ready to be distributed.

Solution

Use OpenSSL to sign your passes.

Discussion

Every pass has to be signed using the certificate that we created in Recipe 23.1. We will use openssl again in Terminal in order to sign our passes. Before you continue reading, make sure that you have created a folder named pass and place your pass.json, manifest.json and all your images in this folder. The folder name doesn’t necessarily have to be called pass. However, to make sure you can follow through the steps in this recipe and the rest of this chapter, it’s best to do what I’ve done and put the files in a folder named pass so you can follow along more easily.

Note

Some of you may be a bit confused as to what keys are which and what certificates do what. I hope I can make it a bit more clear here. When you request a new certificate in the iOS Provisioning Portal, the keychain creates a private key on your computer along with a certificate signing request (CSR) file. The certificate will be generated by Apple. When you download the certificate, its file extension will be .cer. This is just the certificate! When you import this certificate into your keychain, The keychain will automatically associate the certificate with the private key that it created before. Now if you export ...