Purpose of this page

This page describes how developers can deal with ambiguous developer identities when working in the local development environment. In case a developer is member of several projects he or she might have several developer identities located in the keychain. Typically all identities start with "iPhone Developer" and this name is also used inside the Xcode project configuration. When codesign is performed using the command line tool (xcodebuild), the build fails since the codesign identity is ambiguous.

How to deal with several developer identities

First of all it needs to be checked if there is a strong reason for having more than one identity.

In case several developer identities are needed and exist inside the keychain all starting with "iPhone Developer", the full qualified name must be be specified. The full qualified name is displayed inside the keychain and looks typically like "iPhone Developer: <FirstName> <LastName> (<hash>)". The hash is different for each certificate and ensures that the certificates are unique. The full qualified name can be handed over to xcodebuild, e.g.: xcodebuild clean build -configuration Release -sdk iphoneos CODE_SIGN_IDENTITY="iPhone Developer: Jane Doe (V48YT59D7Z)". When using the xcode-maven-plugin the codesign identity can be provided on command line with -Dxcode.codeSignIdentity, e.g. mvn clean install -Dxcode.codeSignIdentity="iPhone Developer: Jane Doe (V48YT59D7Z)"

Do not denote your full qualified identity inside the Xcode project itself. This causes the build to fail for other developers if you are working in a team on the same source base.