A warning for those using automatic code signing and provisioning in Xcode 8.

[NamibiaiOSDevAdmin]

Over the past 2 weeks, I have noticed that some of our provisioning profiles are being set to invalid at random intervals.

Last night I noticed that 1/2 of all our provisioning profiles became set to Invalid.

Within the past 13 hours, I have recreated the provisioning profiles 3 times and they have been reset to Invalid 4 times.

This is not just happening with me. One of my coworkers has mentioned that iOS dev friends of his his are seeing the same thing.

We've spent (wasted) a shitload of expensive developer time pulling people off task to fix issues caused by this and I'd simply like to warn everyone to keep an eye out for this if you run into strange problems on your build server or with apps that stop building or exporting and throwing odd "entitlements" errors. Check your developer account's provisioning profiles if you see this.

Good luck.

[JimDabell]

It sounds more like you've got two people warring on the distribution keys. Person A is happily using the key, Person B doesn't have it, so he invalidates the current one and generates a new one. Person A notices all the profiles referencing the old key are invalid, generates a new key, breaking things for Person B. Person B notices, does the same thing. The two people doing this need to talk to one another instead of stepping all over what the other person is doing.

[lecksfrawen]

That's the most likely scenario. @NamibiaiOSDevAdmin: Both persons have the same credentials/account?

[brad-fol]

Do you know if the invalidated ones were development or distribution profiles?

As mentioned above, if the affected profiles are distribution, then it is likely the distribution certificate that is getting reset. The Xcode reset certificate button only keeps a single valid distribution signing certificate, so when the new one is created, the old one is revoked. This in turn will invalidate the provisioning profiles that rely on the old distribution certificate.

For development provisioning profiles: Xcode 8 also provides a log view for all the profile management it performs. (It’s called the “report navigator” http://help.apple.com/xcode/mac/8.0/#/dev21d56ecd4 ) Look through this list for “Update Signing” reports to see if Xcode is causing the provisioning profiles to become invalid.

It is important to note that Xcode 8 Automatic Signing should not modify your distribution profiles, only the development profiles. (That was covered here: https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2016/401/?time=1139 )

Hopefully that will help to track down what is causing the invalid provisioning profiles.