Allow IOS_DISTRIBUTION certificate type for creation with app-store-connect fetch-signing-files

[dkvyk]

With the current approach (version 0.27.0), when calling

app-store-connect fetch-signing-files

with --type IOS_APP_STORE, if a matching certificate was not found DISTRIBUTION certificate will be created.
Please allow specifying certificate type used for creation.
Because of Apple limitations, we cannot use more than 3 DISTRIBUTION certificates and we want to be able to generate IOS_DISTRIBUTION ones automatically.

[priitlatt]

@dkvyk thank you for the feedback and for raising this issue.

Indeed there is a hard limit of 3 by Apple on how many distribution certificates can a single Apple Developer Portal team have. For now we've chosen to map IOS_APP_STORE provisioning profile type to use DISTRIBUTION certificates as those are more versatile than IOS_DISTRIBUTION certificates in a sense that those can also be used to sign macOS applications. And note that the same maximum of 3 limitation applies to IOS_DISTRIBUTION certificates too.

That being said I think we could add an optional argument --certificate-type (or similar) to app-store-connect fetch-signing-files to force it to use a specific certificate type instead of inferring it from given provisioning profile type.

I'm afraid I cannot give any ETA for you right now when will it be ready.

In the meantime as a workaround you could create a IOS_DISTRIBUTION certificate using

app-store-connect create-certificate --type IOS_DISTRIBUTION

This will create a certificate that can later be picked up by app-store-connect fetch-signing-file as for IOS_APP_STORE profiles it searches both DISTRIBUTION and IOS_DISTRIBUTION certifiactes that can be used with found profiles.