Very lean web layer to build your own iOS Beta Apps deployment platform
Clone the repository on your web server, inside a directory accessible by Apache, and prepare an IPA file that Xcode produced.
Your application is only one Bash command away from your beta-testers :
- ./importIPA.sh IPAFilePath InstallationSubDir DeployURL
This command will process your IPA located at IPAFilePath and copy the result into the local sub-directory InstallationSubDir, corresponding to the URL https://DeployURL/InstallationSubDir/.
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Copy the URL contained in the output of the previous command and paste it into a browser.
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Your application can be installed seamlessly ! (provided the UDID of the device is included into the provisioning profiles included in the app...)
The step 1 actually create a subdir and multiples files :
- an icon extracted from the IPA file
- a manifest.plist file generated from the Info.plist file inside the IPA. This file is crucial for the installation : it's the first file downloaded by the device, through HTTPS.
- the actual IPA file. Yes.
- an HTML file, which is just a shell for the link to the aformentioned manifest.plist file.