Antenna

Antenna aims to take the pain out of creating and distributing all the necessary files for Enterprise iOS over-the-air distribution. It generates the mandatory XML manifest, app icons and an HTML file, automatically extracting all the needed information from the specified .ipa file, and uploads everything via a distribution method of your choice (currently only S3 and local filesystem are supported, but you're encouraged to create other storage backends). The result is a (signed S3) URL, which you may then send to your clients, so they can easily install your app from Mobile Safari with just one tap.

gem install antenna-ota

Antenna adds the antenna command to your PATH:

$ antenna

  Antenna

  Painless iOS over-the-air enterprise distribution

  Commands:
    help    Display global or [command] help documentation
    local   Distribute .ipa file to local file system
    s3      Distribute .ipa file over Amazon S3

  Global Options:
    --verbose
    -h, --help           Display help documentation
    -v, --version        Display version information
    -t, --trace          Display backtrace when an error occurs

    -f, --file FILE                             .ipa file to distribute
    -a, --access-key-id ACCESS_KEY_ID           S3 access key ID
    -s, --secret-access-key SECRET_ACCESS_KEY   S3 secret access key
    -b, --bucket BUCKET                         S3 bucket name
        --[no-]create                           (Don't) create bucket if it doesn't already exist
    -r  --region REGION                         AWS region (optional, e.g. https://mys3.example.com)
    -e  --endpoint ENDPOINT                     S3 endpoint (optional, e.g. https://mys3.example.com)
    -x  --expires EXPIRES                       Expiration of URLs in seconds (optional, e.g. 86400 = one day, one week max)
    -i  --base BASE                             Base filename (optional, defaults to IPA filename without .ipa extension)
    -p  --public                                Use public instead of signed URLs (you'll might want '--acl public-read' also)
        --acl ACL                               Permissions for uploaded files. Must be one of: private, public-read, public-read-write, authenticated-read, bucket-owner-read, bucket-owner-full-control (optional, defaults to private)

    -f, --file FILE      .ipa file to distribute (searches current directory for .ipa files if not specified)
    -U, --url URL        Base URL all files should be prefixed with
    -i, --base BASE      Base filename (optional, defaults to IPA filename without .ipa extension)

Create a new S3 bucket called antenna-ota on Amazon's eu-central-1 S3 cluster and upload OverTheAir.ipa, resulting in a signed URL for distribution:

$ antenna s3 -a <YOUR-S3-ACCESS-KEY> -s <YOUR-S3-SECRET-KEY> --file OverTheAir.ipa --region eu-central-1 --create --bucket antenna-ota
Distributing OverTheAir.ipa ...
Distributing OverTheAir.png ...
Distributing OverTheAir.plist ...
Distributing OverTheAir.html ...
https://antenna-ota.s3.eu-central-1.amazonaws.com/OverTheAir.html?<...signing-parameters...>

Upload OverTheAir.ipa to Amazon's eu-central-1 S3 cluster, resulting in a publically available, unsigned URL for distribution:

$ antenna s3 -a <YOUR-S3-ACCESS-KEY> -s <YOUR-S3-SECRET-KEY> --file OverTheAir.ipa --public --acl public-read --region eu-central-1 --bucket antenna-ota
Distributing OverTheAir.ipa ...
Distributing OverTheAir.png ...
Distributing OverTheAir.plist ...
Distributing OverTheAir.html ...
https://antenna-ota.s3.eu-central-1.amazonaws.com/OverTheAir.html

The resulting URLs show an installation page like the following and can be distributed to your users for installation. The meta-data and app-icon is automatically extracted from the given .ipa file:

Note: App icons in any .ipa file are converted from PNG to Apple's CgBI file format and therefore not viewable in most applications, including Chrome and Firefox. Apple applications like (Mobile) Safari or Preview.app know how to handle the format though.

Distribute OverTheAir.ipa to the local file-system. The resulting files can then be uploaded manually:

$ antenna local --url https://www.example.com/ipa/ --file OverTheAir.ipa
Distributing OverTheAir.ipa ...
Distributing OverTheAir.png ...
Distributing OverTheAir.plist ...
Distributing OverTheAir.html ...
https://www.example.com/ipa/OverTheAir.html

Tobi Kremer (soulchild)

Inspired by Mattt Thompson's iOS toolchain.

Bug reports and pull requests are welcome on GitHub.

The gem is available as open source under the terms of the MIT License.