appify VS gon

I have tried various existing solutions such as https://github.com/machinebox/appify, but they just don't seem to work for me, my Unix Executable runs fine under normal circumstances, but with this tool the .app file just crashes straight away with no console output.

You can port the project to XCode or use this: https://github.com/machinebox/appify

Maybe you can get together with this project (not affiliated). I've used it many times to make Mac installers. I think there's been a few requests to add functionality similar to what your project does.

It might be less effort to use something like this: https://gregoryszorc.com/blog/2021/04/14/pure-rust-implement...

Might even be able to modify `gon` to use that instead of Apple's `codesign` and then you'll have notarization too: https://github.com/mitchellh/gon

I’ve always used gon ( https://github.com/mitchellh/gon ) for this, which is open source golang, but I don’t think it supports mach-o embedding. I’ll have to try this tool out.

There is no need for some special solution to pack your .app, you need to create .app directories, copy your binary, create Info.plist with metadata about your binary, icon, etc. I did this for a couple of apps and it is simple. It is another thing if you want to sign and notarize the binary, there are other tools for that, like https://github.com/mitchellh/gon.

I use gon to sign and notarize a DMG file. Once you set it up, it's a simple one-line command that will upload the DMG to Apple, await notarization, and give you back a DMG that's ready for distribution.

My advice from years of notarizing my apps is to make sure you do it at least once per day for each of your apps. If you only notarize once every release (say, every month or so), you are almost guaranteed to encounter some new cryptic error that you've never seen before, either due to some glitch in signing your app or frameworks, or else some server-side error such as new terms & conditions that you are being "encouraged" to agree to. It will take you hours to research and resolve them if they aren't spotted right away.

As others pointed out, https://github.com/mitchellh/gon is a great tool for doing this on your local machine (e.g., with a cron job). In addition, if you are building your app using a GitHub action (which I highly recommend if it is open-source), you can use my https://github.com/hubomatic/hubomat action to package and notarize a release in one shot. The sample/template app does this automatically on every commit as well as once per day: https://github.com/hubomatic/MicroVector/actions.

So when this fails from a scheduled job, you at least know that something has changed on the Apple side and can investigate that right away. And if it fails as a result of a commit, then at least you can start looking at what changes you may have made to your entitlements or code signing settings or embedded frameworks or any of the other million things that can cause it to fail.