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Show HN: Xcnotary – a Mac app notarization helper made with Rust

125 points by davidvartan 7y ago

robenkleene 7y ago
There’s also a nice GUI app called “SD Notary” from a well-respected, long-time Mac app developer (Late Night Software, developer of Script Debugger) https://latenightsw.com/sd-notary-notarizing-made-easy/ https://latenightsw.com/sd-notary-notarizing-made-easy/
davidvartan 7y ago
(The author.) I had originally written a version of this in Python for my own use, and recently thought of rewriting it in Rust as a learning experience. What I found is that writing a CLI in Rust is a absolute breeze, in part due to excellent documentation and the tooling, and also thanks to various well-maintained crates, such as StructOpt [1] to parse command line arguments of any complexity, or indicatif [2] to show animated progress. [1] https://github.com/akeru-inc/xcnotary/blob/11649e49892d8175470bf992661d6410cd9ead1d/src/main.rs#L11-L26 https://github.com/akeru-inc/xcnotary/blob/11649e49892d81754... [2] https://github.com/akeru-inc/xcnotary/blob/11649e49892d8175470bf992661d6410cd9ead1d/src/notarize/run.rs#L182-L192 https://github.com/akeru-inc/xcnotary/blob/11649e49892d81754...
- tedmielczarek 7y ago
  Very cool! Tangentially related, I looked into reimplementing `codesign` in Rust while I was at Mozilla. We wanted to see if we could take Apple hardware out of the loop for our release process after we had switched Mac Firefox builds to cross-compile from Linux. I got a bunch of code written and I'm pretty sure I could have made it work if I had gotten the go-ahead to spend time on it but then we heard about notarization and decided it wasn't worth the effort since Apple was going to require us to use their service anyway.
  - saagarjha 7y ago
    > we had switched Mac Firefox builds to cross-compile from Linux Did you link against TBD files?
  - davidvartan 7y ago
    That sounds like a fun project! I do hope Apple shows more love to the command line tooling in general (even if Mac-only) as the workflow still seems somewhat optimized for clicking one-by-one in Xcode.
  - detaro 6y ago
    > after we had switched Mac Firefox builds to cross-compile from Linux Do you happen to have a link with more details about how that's done?
    - tedmielczarek 6y ago
      It's not really written down anywhere but you can see the gory history of how we got it together in bugzilla: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=921040 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=921040 We used the MacOSX SDK from Xcode, packaged up into our internal file store for build machines to use and passed a bunch of compiler options that clang sets by default when you're compiling on macOS: https://searchfox.org/mozilla-central/rev/72e3388f74458d369af4f6cdbaeaacb719523b8c/build/macosx/cross-mozconfig.common https://searchfox.org/mozilla-central/rev/72e3388f74458d369a... Getting DMG creation working was a bit of a hassle but we managed to get it done with some dmg/hfsplus tools from the iPhone jailbreak scene.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
saagarjha 7y ago
Aside: GitHub seems to dislike your animated SVG for some reason, since it won't play unless I open it manually. I think sanitize=true does that; try hosting it somewhere else?
- davidvartan 7y ago
  Thanks for the heads up! May I ask what browser you are using? If there are compatibility issues I may just re-render these as GIFs.
  - saagarjha 7y ago
    Safari. I know that animated SVGs do work on GitHub in the browser; I just don't know why this one doesn't.
  - floatingatoll 7y ago
    The SVG works fine in jsfiddle, which eventually led me to find https://stackoverflow.com/a/53717429 https://stackoverflow.com/a/53717429 talking about 'animation' (which your SVG seems to mention, and I don't see a dur= property which GitHub does seem to support.)
    - saagarjha 7y ago
      It also works fine if I try to view it by itself.
  - Sephr 7y ago
    How did you generate this animated SVG terminal screen capture?
    - davidvartan 7y ago
      asciinema to generate a raw json file, then svg-term to convert it to svg https://github.com/asciinema/asciinema https://github.com/asciinema/asciinema https://github.com/marionebl/svg-term-cli https://github.com/marionebl/svg-term-cli (I ended up moving the SVG assets to GitHub Pages which hopefully fixes the issue others were seeing.)
_bxg1 7y ago
Very cool utility. Rust seems like an odd choice since there's little processing work to be done other than the zipping - which could be outsourced to the "zip" tool - but I guess a learning exercise is a learning exercise.
- cjbassi 7y ago
  Rust is actually great for cli applications regardless of performance benefits because of its good ergonomics and package management once you get over the hump of learning it.
  - jfkebwjsbx 7y ago
    The comparison is against Python, which definitely has better ergonomics and includes everything needed for scripts like this (but does have package management too if the huge standard library is not enough).
    - nicoburns 7y ago
      I disagree that Python has better ergonomics than Rust for scripts like this. For example, IMO python doesn't have anything as nice as Rust's structopt library for argument parsing (https://github.com/TeXitoi/structopt https://github.com/TeXitoi/structopt). Python does have package management, but it's a pain to use compared to Rust or JavaScript (have to setup virtual envs, etc - not very ergonomic!). You also mostly don't hit into the tricky ownership issues that can make Rust less ergonomic in CLI apps. Because the code flow is usually quite linear, so you don't have multiple bits of code trying to access the same variables at once. Note: Although Rust has static types, it has very good type inference such that you don't often have to explicitly state the types. IMO this brings Rust pretty close to dynamic language ergonomics for simple things like this.
      - jfkebwjsbx 7y ago
        Python has argparse in the standard library which does everything you may need and more. You can even make Git-like interfaces with it. For most CLI tools you do not even need third-party packages in Python to begin with. You cannot beat that. And if you do, you don't need virtualenvs, because your system package manager can do the job just fine for most cases, or you can use pip or you can locally deploy. Python has no ownership issues to think about. You cannot beat that either. Type inference is nowhere close to dynamic typing. Then there are other things like no compile-edit cycle in Python. No binary distribution. No shenanigans like issues with missing libraries and dynamic linking. So you may disagree, but your points are not valid. The actual advantage for going for a compiled low-level language is performance, so unless you need that, there is no point on using Rust or any other compiled language for the majority of the boilerplate code for small scripts and CLI tools.
leecb 7y ago
Very cool work! I just manually implemented this in a python script. Does it support other platforms? Will it run on Linux?
- davidvartan 7y ago
  The notarization service is opaque (uses Xcode's "xcrun altool" to submit/read status, instead of something like a REST API...) so unfortunately Mac-only at the moment.
  - baszalmstra 7y ago
    That's too bad, I would've loved to do this from a docker container.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
ridiculous_fish 7y ago
Thank you for building this. The notarization process is navigable but baroque, especially from the command line. fish shell's notarization script: https://github.com/fish-shell/fish-shell/blob/master/build_tools/mac_notarize.sh https://github.com/fish-shell/fish-shell/blob/master/build_t...
- davidvartan 7y ago
  It was surprising that they didn't provide an all-in-one blocking command, leaving everyone to write their own version of the submit(); while(true) { poll(); }. I will need to add support for .pkg to cover more use cases. (Right now the tool specifically checks the input to be an .app bundle and zips it up for submission.)
- robin_reala 7y ago
  Strange that it’s written in Bash!
  - faho 7y ago
    This is necessary for building fish. If we wrote it in fish script, we'd run into the bootstrapping problem, where you'd need fish to build fish.
filmgirlcw 7y ago
I love this. Amazing work — thanks for making this process easier.
- davidvartan 7y ago
  Thank you!
cmyr 7y ago
Neat! I was just about to need something like this, for building native app bundles for druid[1]. I'll open an issue, but do you have any interest in exposing this as a library? [1] https://github.com/xi-editor/druid https://github.com/xi-editor/druid

125 points by davidvartan 7y ago

There’s also a nice GUI app called “SD Notary” from a well-respected, long-time Mac app developer (Late Night Software, developer of Script Debugger) https://latenightsw.com/sd-notary-notarizing-made-easy/ https://latenightsw.com/sd-notary-notarizing-made-easy/

davidvartan 7y ago

(The author.) I had originally written a version of this in Python for my own use, and recently thought of rewriting it in Rust as a learning experience. What I found is that writing a CLI in Rust is a absolute breeze, in part due to excellent documentation and the tooling, and also thanks to various well-maintained crates, such as StructOpt [1] to parse command line arguments of any complexity, or indicatif [2] to show animated progress. [1] https://github.com/akeru-inc/xcnotary/blob/11649e49892d8175470bf992661d6410cd9ead1d/src/main.rs#L11-L26 https://github.com/akeru-inc/xcnotary/blob/11649e49892d81754... [2] https://github.com/akeru-inc/xcnotary/blob/11649e49892d8175470bf992661d6410cd9ead1d/src/notarize/run.rs#L182-L192 https://github.com/akeru-inc/xcnotary/blob/11649e49892d81754...

tedmielczarek 7y ago
Very cool! Tangentially related, I looked into reimplementing `codesign` in Rust while I was at Mozilla. We wanted to see if we could take Apple hardware out of the loop for our release process after we had switched Mac Firefox builds to cross-compile from Linux. I got a bunch of code written and I'm pretty sure I could have made it work if I had gotten the go-ahead to spend time on it but then we heard about notarization and decided it wasn't worth the effort since Apple was going to require us to use their service anyway.
- saagarjha 7y ago
  > we had switched Mac Firefox builds to cross-compile from Linux Did you link against TBD files?
- davidvartan 7y ago
  That sounds like a fun project! I do hope Apple shows more love to the command line tooling in general (even if Mac-only) as the workflow still seems somewhat optimized for clicking one-by-one in Xcode.
- detaro 6y ago
  > after we had switched Mac Firefox builds to cross-compile from Linux Do you happen to have a link with more details about how that's done?
  - tedmielczarek 6y ago
    It's not really written down anywhere but you can see the gory history of how we got it together in bugzilla: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=921040 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=921040 We used the MacOSX SDK from Xcode, packaged up into our internal file store for build machines to use and passed a bunch of compiler options that clang sets by default when you're compiling on macOS: https://searchfox.org/mozilla-central/rev/72e3388f74458d369af4f6cdbaeaacb719523b8c/build/macosx/cross-mozconfig.common https://searchfox.org/mozilla-central/rev/72e3388f74458d369a... Getting DMG creation working was a bit of a hassle but we managed to get it done with some dmg/hfsplus tools from the iPhone jailbreak scene.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

saagarjha 7y ago

Aside: GitHub seems to dislike your animated SVG for some reason, since it won't play unless I open it manually. I think sanitize=true does that; try hosting it somewhere else?

davidvartan 7y ago
Thanks for the heads up! May I ask what browser you are using? If there are compatibility issues I may just re-render these as GIFs.
- saagarjha 7y ago
  Safari. I know that animated SVGs do work on GitHub in the browser; I just don't know why this one doesn't.
- floatingatoll 7y ago
  The SVG works fine in jsfiddle, which eventually led me to find https://stackoverflow.com/a/53717429 https://stackoverflow.com/a/53717429 talking about 'animation' (which your SVG seems to mention, and I don't see a dur= property which GitHub does seem to support.)
  - saagarjha 7y ago
    It also works fine if I try to view it by itself.
- Sephr 7y ago
  How did you generate this animated SVG terminal screen capture?
  - davidvartan 7y ago
    asciinema to generate a raw json file, then svg-term to convert it to svg https://github.com/asciinema/asciinema https://github.com/asciinema/asciinema https://github.com/marionebl/svg-term-cli https://github.com/marionebl/svg-term-cli (I ended up moving the SVG assets to GitHub Pages which hopefully fixes the issue others were seeing.)

_bxg1 7y ago

Very cool utility. Rust seems like an odd choice since there's little processing work to be done other than the zipping - which could be outsourced to the "zip" tool - but I guess a learning exercise is a learning exercise.

cjbassi 7y ago
Rust is actually great for cli applications regardless of performance benefits because of its good ergonomics and package management once you get over the hump of learning it.
- jfkebwjsbx 7y ago
  The comparison is against Python, which definitely has better ergonomics and includes everything needed for scripts like this (but does have package management too if the huge standard library is not enough).
  - nicoburns 7y ago
    I disagree that Python has better ergonomics than Rust for scripts like this. For example, IMO python doesn't have anything as nice as Rust's structopt library for argument parsing (https://github.com/TeXitoi/structopt https://github.com/TeXitoi/structopt). Python does have package management, but it's a pain to use compared to Rust or JavaScript (have to setup virtual envs, etc - not very ergonomic!). You also mostly don't hit into the tricky ownership issues that can make Rust less ergonomic in CLI apps. Because the code flow is usually quite linear, so you don't have multiple bits of code trying to access the same variables at once. Note: Although Rust has static types, it has very good type inference such that you don't often have to explicitly state the types. IMO this brings Rust pretty close to dynamic language ergonomics for simple things like this.
    - jfkebwjsbx 7y ago
      Python has argparse in the standard library which does everything you may need and more. You can even make Git-like interfaces with it. For most CLI tools you do not even need third-party packages in Python to begin with. You cannot beat that. And if you do, you don't need virtualenvs, because your system package manager can do the job just fine for most cases, or you can use pip or you can locally deploy. Python has no ownership issues to think about. You cannot beat that either. Type inference is nowhere close to dynamic typing. Then there are other things like no compile-edit cycle in Python. No binary distribution. No shenanigans like issues with missing libraries and dynamic linking. So you may disagree, but your points are not valid. The actual advantage for going for a compiled low-level language is performance, so unless you need that, there is no point on using Rust or any other compiled language for the majority of the boilerplate code for small scripts and CLI tools.

leecb 7y ago

Very cool work! I just manually implemented this in a python script. Does it support other platforms? Will it run on Linux?

davidvartan 7y ago
The notarization service is opaque (uses Xcode's "xcrun altool" to submit/read status, instead of something like a REST API...) so unfortunately Mac-only at the moment.
- baszalmstra 7y ago
  That's too bad, I would've loved to do this from a docker container.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

ridiculous_fish 7y ago

Thank you for building this. The notarization process is navigable but baroque, especially from the command line. fish shell's notarization script: https://github.com/fish-shell/fish-shell/blob/master/build_tools/mac_notarize.sh https://github.com/fish-shell/fish-shell/blob/master/build_t...

davidvartan 7y ago
It was surprising that they didn't provide an all-in-one blocking command, leaving everyone to write their own version of the submit(); while(true) { poll(); }. I will need to add support for .pkg to cover more use cases. (Right now the tool specifically checks the input to be an .app bundle and zips it up for submission.)
robin_reala 7y ago
Strange that it’s written in Bash!
- faho 7y ago
  This is necessary for building fish. If we wrote it in fish script, we'd run into the bootstrapping problem, where you'd need fish to build fish.

filmgirlcw 7y ago

I love this. Amazing work — thanks for making this process easier.

davidvartan 7y ago
Thank you!

cmyr 7y ago

Neat! I was just about to need something like this, for building native app bundles for druid[1]. I'll open an issue, but do you have any interest in exposing this as a library? [1] https://github.com/xi-editor/druid https://github.com/xi-editor/druid