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mitchellh
gon
Go2019–2023
mitchellh / gon · Archived

gon

Sign, notarize, and package macOS CLI tools and applications written in any language. Available as both a CLI and a Go library.

7Distinct people
7Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
1.5KGitHub stars
REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

What to know before exploring

What it is

Sign, notarize, and package macOS CLI tools and applications written in any language. Available as both a CLI and a Go library.

GitHub

Where it is used

No documented product use has been verified yet.

What people are saying

No recommendation phrase was found in the indexed comments.

No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.

Also in these discussions

No other repository is repeatedly linked in the same discussions.

This week on Hacker News

Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 1:49:46 PM UTC.

No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.

Mentions over time

HN mentions by year7 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2019-11-04 18:17:37 UTC to 2023-01-14 02:49:51 UTC.

01232019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 3 mentions; 3 submissions, 0 comments20192020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 0 submissions, 2 comments20212022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2023

Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.

View mention counts and date ranges
UTC ranges include their start and exclude their end. Select a period to filter the source evidence.
PeriodStart (UTC)End (exclusive, UTC)MentionsSubmissionsComments
20192019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC330
20202020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20212021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC202
20222022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
20232023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101

What Hacker News says

7 sources
My advice from years of notarizing my apps is to make sure you do it at least once per day for each of your apps. If you only notarize once every release (say, every month or so), you are almost guaranteed to encounter some new cryptic error that you've never seen before, either due to some glitch in signing your app or frameworks, or else some server-side error such as new terms & conditions that you are being "encouraged" to agree to. It will take you hours to research and resolve them if they aren't spotted right away. As others pointed out, https://github.com/mitchellh/gon is a great tool for doing this on your local machine (e.g., with a cron job). In addition, if you are building your app using a GitHub action (which I highly recommend if it is open-source), you can use my https://github.com/hubomatic/hubomat action to package, nota
Read the rest
rize, and staple a release build in one shot. The sample/template app does this automatically on every commit as well as once per day: https://github.com/hubomatic/MicroVector/actions. So when this fails from a scheduled job, you at least know that something has changed on the Apple side and can investigate that right away. And if it fails as a result of a commit, then at least you can start looking at what changes you may have made to your entitlements or code signing settings or embedded frameworks or any of the other million things that can cause it to fail.
In The Gates to Hell: Apple’s Notarizing
And, not mentioned in the article... you have to have an Apple Developer ID which costs £79/year ($99). Presumably if your subscription lapses any previously released software will stop working? That is the part I find most offensive, if it was just difficult and buggy I would suck it up and work around it. But having to pay for the privilege is too painful, particularly if you're offering free software. For my case (non GUI app) I can at least distribute via Homebrew and have the user build from source in a more or less automated way. Another notarization helper tool is here https://github.com/mitchellh/gon
In The Gates to Hell: Apple’s Notarizing

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