[Baypiggies] Help with creating Python-based Mac Application

Deirdre Saoirse Moen deirdre at deirdre.net
Fri Aug 5 14:03:17 EDT 2022


On Fri, Aug 5, 2022, at 10:43 AM, irv furrypants.com wrote:
> But I've found that building a Mac application is quite a bit more 
> complicated.  I can build the Mac application and it runs fine ... on 
> my computer.  But it won't run on any other Mac.  This is because of a 
> relatively new safety feature of the Mac called GateKeeper.  In order 
> to run on other Macs now, applications need to be "signed" by the 
> developer.

Right, everything's got to be signed if it's running on a "non-blessed" system. (You can add specific devices that'll load development or enterprise builds in the developer portal if you just want to add another device for testing.)

Partly this is because each app is now run in a chrooted space in its own sandbox. You can share some parts of sandboxes between different apps you create, but it of course doesn't know what's "yours" until you sign it.

> So I've paid my $99 to become an official Apple developer.  But I am 
> lost trying to read through all the documentation from both Apple and 
> PyInstaller (using ".spec" files) about how to use the Apple Developer 
> ID and "certificates".  Apple's documentation is all about how to use 
> Xcode - which I'm not using.  It's completely unclear to me what steps 
> I have to do to sign my application.

These days, I'm a Swift developer, so I only know how to do the signing via Xcode (Product -> Archive after setting the target to the "Any Mac" generic device). I'll look after work and see if there's some command-line utility that may help you.

What tools are you using to creating your app (other than PyInstaller)?

> I'm asking if anyone here has gone through the process of turning a 
> Python program into a Mac executable and wouldn't mind spending some 
> time with me (via Zoom) to help me get this done.  

I deal with Gatekeeper several times a day, so that part I know, but haven't tried it in a non-canonical language.

Offhand, the only app I can think of that uses Python to create an app was the Zelda clone, but the repo's so big that each segment is zipped: https://github.com/clear-code-projects/Zelda - and I don't know if it was a signed app to begin with.

Deirdre


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