iOS App distribution - Archiving an .ipa file

Question

I have an .ipa file which is signed with an Enterprise Certificate and using an inHouse distribution profile. I do not have the original source code with me. When I went through the distribution article in Dev center, I understood that it has to be archived for distribution purpose. I do not know how to archive an .ipa file. Could you please assist me in this? I'm new to this iOS development world.

Answer 1

I am going to assume everything was built and signed properly, with the proper provisioning profiles and distribution certificates.

You need the myApp.ipa and the myApp.plist generated by XCode, there may be others ways, but generating these via Xcode is the easiest. Once you have both of these files, upload them to your server (e.g. public_html/app/myApp.ipa and public_html/app/myApp.plist).

Your users navigate to your download page via Safari. On this page you include a link like the following:

<a href="itms-services://?action=download-manifest&url=http://mydomain.com/app/myApp.plist">Install the app</a>

It is pointing to the myApp.plist. This must have (among other things) an item like the following (not sure about the exact format at the moment, but it is easy to spot if you open the .plist file in text editor):

<key>url</key>
<string>http://mydomain.com/app/myApp.ipa</string>

This URL is also usually added during the archive in XCode, but it can be easliy edited. It points to the .ipa (which really a zip file containg the executable and other resources like images).

When users tap "Install the app" in Safari, it will read the plist file, and if everything was successful up to this point, will prompt the user to install the application.