How to disable auto-locking of MacOS Keychains

I wrote “2021-03-14-how-to-disable-auto-locking-of-macos-keychains” to share practical, production-minded guidance on this topic.

We streamlined the configuration of our Mac Build agents to a repository where we can update our Provisioning Profiles, Keychains, etc.

Lately, I’m seeing a lot of this:

error: No signing certificate "iOS Distribution" found: No "iOS Distribution" signing certificate matching team ID "XXXXXXXX" with a private key was found. (in target 'XXXXX' from project 'XXXXX')

It turns out that the Keychain where the distribution certificate and private key was stored keeps locking up every 2 hours.

Here’s a simple step by step process to remove that lock 🔐 .

1. Open the local copy of your Keychain through Keychain Access.

2. Right click on the keychain and select “Change Settings…”

3. Untick the “Lock after…” and “Lock when sleeping”. Click on Save.

4. Back on the keychain items, right click on the private key. Select “Allow all applications…” since the build servers doesn’t really need a GUI, otherwise you would need to manually RDP to the servers and unlock the keychain.

5. Save all changes. Create a pull request. Merge the branch. Run the pipeline again.\n\n## Takeaways\n\nAdd a concise, personal takeaway and recommended next steps here.\n