I wanted to code sign a runtime to avoid issues with users who had the higher security level set on their 10.8 based systems. Although lowering these permissions or holding down the control key when the app is launched will all help with this issue, code signing seems a reasonable and desirable, and removed the support issue.
There are a few ways to get the needed certificates, but in my case I got them as part of my Mac OS Developer account at Apple. I won’t go in to the details right now (possibly I’ll update this later to include this), so here I am assuming you’ve already gone through the needed steps to get the certificates into your keychain.
I had tried this previously using the codesign command, but kept hitting various issues. Recently however I updated to XCode 4.6, so I decided to try again. There is a possibility I could’ve gotten this to work by creating a dummy XCode project, and adding the needed build phases to copy the files over. But some testing on that front showed that it wasn’t straightforward process to get this to happen. The codesign command is however pretty straightforward, but there was one unexpected step. I would get the following error:
object file format unrecognized, invalid, or unsuitable
Turns out that before signing, you must first run the following in Terminal:
export CODESIGN_ALLOCATE=”/Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/Developer/usr/bin/codesign_allocate”
Then this is all you need to do to complete the signing process: codesign -s “Developer ID Application: Beezwax Datatools, Inc.” /Volumes/Data/Users/sibr/_Clients/beezwax/Code Sign Test/Code Sign Test/Code Sign Test.app
Simon