Indie Mac App DevOps With GitHub Actions

Automate testing, signing, notarizing, and distribution

Photo by ray rui on Unsplash

Are you thinking about writing an app for macOS? Would you like to distribute it outside the Mac App Store using Homebrew? In this article, I describe how to use GitHub and GitHub Actions to set up continuous integration, delivery, and deployment for a Mac app signed with an Apple Developer ID. Best of all, if the app is open source, everything I describe is completely free to use! (If your app isn’t open source but is hosted in a private repository on GitHub, you can still do this for free, subject to limits.)

Why Is This Hard?

It used to be that you could just compile your code, package it in an archive or installer, put it on a site for download, and expect people to download it — not anymore. Thanks to the spread of malware, Apple has added restrictions to the operating system to prevent untrusted code from running. These restrictions complicate building and packaging. Furthermore, users who’ve used Homebrew expect to be able to install and keep up-to-date software from the command-line. This expectation complicates distribution, as well.

Since 2012, the Mac operating system has included Gatekeeper, a feature that requires apps to have been signed with Apple-provided cryptographic…