Automating the Generation of iOS Push Notification Certificates

I have a large number (200+) of iOS applications. I needed to generate push notification certificates for each of them. If you’ve ever gone through the process, it can be a huge pain to do just a few. I needed to write a script
to automate this process.

First, I created a ruby gem to access the Mac OS X Keychain App.

Next, I leveraged watir to actually login to the iOS provisioning portal and upload/download the necessary files.

First, make sure that you’re using Mac OS X 10.7 (Lion) and that you have Chrome and Ruby 1.9.2 installed.

1. Download chromedriver http://code.google.com/p/chromium/downloads/list
2. Move the binary to /usr/local

Next, run these commands:

git clone git://github.com/jprichardson/GeneratePushCerts.git
gem install 'keychain_manager'
gem install 'watir-webdriver'
cd ./GeneratePushCerts

Modify the ‘config.example.yml’ file with your iOS developer/provisioning portal credentials. Rename the file
to ‘config.yml’.

You’ll want to edit ‘app.rb’ and modify the END_WITH variable and set it to ”. I should have created a regular expression around line 60.

Run the app ‘ruby app.rb’.

Let’s take a look at some watir code from the file:

  browser.checkbox(id: 'enablePush').click() #enable configure buttons
  browser.button(id: 'aps-assistant-btn-prod-en').click() #configure button

  Watir::Wait.until { browser.body.text.include?('Generate a Certificate Signing Request') }

  browser.button(id: 'ext-gen59').click() #on lightbox overlay, click continue

  Watir::Wait.until { browser.body.text.include?('Submit Certificate Signing Request') }

  browser.file_field(name: 'upload').set(CERT_REQUEST_FILE)
  browser.execute_script("callFileValidate();")
  #browser.file_field(name: 'upload').click() #calls some local javascript to validate the file and enable continue button, unfortunately File Browse dialog shows up

  browser.button(id: 'ext-gen75').click()

  Watir::Wait.until(WAIT_TO) { browser.body.text.include?('Your APNs SSL Certificate has been generated.') }

  browser.button(id: 'ext-gen59').click() #continue

  Watir::Wait.until { browser.body.text.include?('Step 1: Download') }

  File.delete(DOWNLOADED_CERT_FILE) if File.exists?(DOWNLOADED_CERT_FILE)

  browser.button(alt: 'Download').click() #download cert

  puts('Checking for existence of downloaded certificate file...')
  while !File.exists?(DOWNLOADED_CERT_FILE)
    sleep 1
  end

  Watir::Wait.until { browser.body.text.include?("Download & Install Your Apple Push Notification service SSL Certificate") }

  browser.button(id: 'ext-gen91').click()
  browser.goto(APP_IDS_URL)

You can browse the entire source code on Github.

I think watir is pretty intuitive and is a swiss army knife for automating the interaction with web pages. It’s pretty slow as it’s meant for testing, so I wouldn’t use it for screen scraping, but it’s served me well for this task.

Do you use Git? If so, checkout Gitpilot to make using Git thoughtless.

Follow me on Twitter: @jprichardson and read my blog on entrepreneurship: Techneur.

-JP Richardson

Automating the Mac OS X Keychain App with Ruby

Recently, I needed a way to automate the generation of 100+ Apple Push notification certificates for my iOS development. So, I created a Ruby Gem [keychain_manager] to automate the Mac OS X Keychain application.

Here is how you can use it:

gem install keychain_manager


require 'keychain_manager'

USER = 'jprichardson@gmail.com'
KEYCHAIN = 'apple_push_keychain' #this can be anything, we just don't want to pollute the 'login' keychain
YOUR_DOWNLOADS_DIR = '' # you must set this, this is where the file aps_production_identity.cer exists

RSA_FILE = '/tmp/myrsa.key'
KeychainManager.generate_rsa_key(RSA_FILE)

CERT_FILE = '/tmp/CertificateSigningRequest.certSigningRequest'
KeychainManager.generate_cert_request(USER, 'US', CERT_FILE) #'US' is the country abbreviation.

kcm = KeychainManager.new(KEYCHAIN)
kcm.delete if kcm.exists?
kcm.create

kcm.import_rsa_key(RSA_FILE)

#now from your browser, you'll have downloaded a file from Apple typically named: aps_production_identity.cer
kcm.import_apple_cert(File.join(YOUR_DOWNLOADS_DIR, '/aps_production_identity.cer'))

P12_FILE = '/tmp/push_prod.p12'
kcm.export_identites(P12_FILE)

PEM_FILE = '/tmp/push_prod.pem'
KeychainManager.convert_p12_to_pem(P12_FILE, PEM_FILE)

kcm.delete

#Now upload the PEM_FILE to your server.

This gem could easily be modified to support other Keychain functions. Browse the sourcecode here: Keychain Manager source code.

I’ll post soon on how I automated the web portion of communicating with the iOS Provisioning Portal.

Do you use Git? If so, checkout Gitpilot to make using Git thoughtless.

Follow me on Twitter: @jprichardson and read my blog on entrepreneurship: Techneur.

-JP Richardson

Levenshtein in Ruby 1.9

In Ruby 1.8, I would use the gem ‘levenshtein’… well that doesn’t work in 1.9. So you need to install the gem ‘text’.

Then the call is as simple as:

Text::Levenshtein.distance('hello', 'hell')

Are you a Git user? Let me help you make project management with Git simple. Checkout Gitpilot.

Follow me on Twitter: @jprichardson

-JP