Publish .NET apps for macOS

Publishing .NET applications for macOS requires several additional steps compared to other platforms, due to Apple's security requirements.

Prerequisites

Before you publish your .NET application for macOS, ensure you have the following:

• Apple Developer Account: Needed for code signing and notarization.
• Xcode Command Line Tools: Provides codesign, altool, and other utilities.
• .NET SDK: Ensure you have the latest .NET SDK installed.

Produce your app using .NET SDK

Use one of the methods described in the .NET application publishing overview to produce an application. You can create either a framework-dependent or self-contained application.

Sign and notarize your app

Use Apple's developer documentation to sign and notarize the app native binaries. .NET creates a native apphost executable as the entry point for your app. This apphost must be signed and, if your app uses special capabilities, it must be assigned the appropriate entitlements.

Entitlements for apps not published as Native AOT

For apps not published as Native AOT, the com.apple.security.cs.allow-jit entitlement is required.

Entitlements for apps published as Native AOT

For apps published as Native AOT, no entitlements are required.

Optional entitlements for debugging and diagnostics

The following entitlements enable additional debugging and diagnostic capabilities:

• com.apple.security.get-task-allow: Needed for dump collection with createdump and dotnet dump.
• com.apple.security.cs.debugger: Needed to attach a debugger to the process.