mokacoding

unit and acceptance testing, automation, productivity

How to check if macOS app is notarized

Today I was wondering wheter a .app I uploaded to a third-party distribution provider was notarized due to an error I saw when launching it.

Me being me, I naturally checked for a Terminal option, and I stumbled upon this post from the developers forum which suggests to use spctl:

spctl -a -t exec -v /path/to/notarised.app
source=Notarized Developer ID

spctl -a -t exec -v /path/to/not_notarised.app
source=Developer ID

The command is a "subsystem maintains and evaluates rules that determine whether the system allows the installation, execution, and other operations on files on the system."

-a requests an assessment on the given file, -t execute specifies the assessment is for code execution, -v makes the output verbose (the more vs you add the more verbose it gets, but I haven't seen any difference between -vv and -vvv, and the only really useful information was already part of -v)

Something else I notices was that the .app in the .xcarchive stored in /Library/Developer/Xcode/Archives was not stapled despite having gon through notarization successfully.

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