I hosted my no-Mac iOS pipeline as a browser wizard (and dropped the price to $1 for a day)
A while back I wrote about the GitHub Actions pipeline I built to ship Citolex to the App Store without ever owning a Mac. The pipeline itself hasn't changed much, but how you set it up has. Until now, using it meant downloading a template and running a setup script yourself. That's fine for most developers, but it's still a terminal and a handful of manual steps between paying and having a…
I recently wrote about a GitHub Actions pipeline that allowed the distribution of Citolex to the App Store without the need for a Mac. As time has gone on, the setup process for using this pipeline has evolved. Previously, users had to download a template and run a setup script themselves. This was manageable for most developers, but it still involved a terminal and several manual steps between paying and having a functional pipeline.
To simplify this process, I created a hosted version of the pipeline. Users simply pay a fee, connect their GitHub account via an OAuth flow, and either pick an existing repository or create a new one. A wizard then commits the complete pipeline template directly into the user's repository, without the need for any Git operations on their part.
The wizard guides users through entering their signing secrets and provides an inline Signing Doctor check that instantly identifies any issues with certificates or provisioning profiles. This occurs before any build is triggered, allowing users to address problems proactively.
Should a build fail, the same wizard automatically reruns the diagnosis based on the current secrets and presents the results alongside the failed logs. Importantly, the signing diagnosis does not rely on any macOS-specific tools. Provisioning profiles are signed using CMS/PKCS7 blobs, certificates are X.509, and keystores are PKCS12—all standard cryptographic formats that Web Crypto can parse directly. This capability enabled the entire pipeline to run on a Cloudflare Worker rather than requiring an actual Mac or VM.
To encourage wider adoption and testing, I decided to offer the service for $1 over the usual $99 for iOS or $39 for Android for the next 24 hours. While this pricing is temporary, the goal is to allow more people to experience the end-to-end process rather than just reading about it. For those interested in exploring the pipeline further, I encourage them to visit macless.dev, the website built by me to showcase this Macless development approach.
Written by urgent.news from Dev.to's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
