This tool reads Apple's provisioning profile files and produces reproducible output perfect for diffing. You can easily integrate this with git diff to automatically normalize these when diffing commits containing profiles.

Install with homebrew:

brew install keith/formulae/normalize-profile

Or put normalize-profile somewhere in your $PATH and make sure you have python3 installed.

Output a profile with all contents normalized:

normalize-profile foo.mobileprovision

Ignore some fields that always changes and don't always provide useful information:

normalize-profile --ignore-field UUID --ignore-field CreationDate foo.mobileprovision

Ignore all the fields that always change and you have no control over (note this could mean you see a file has changed with git status and yet running git diff shows no output. In the case of ExpirationDate you might still need to check in the updated profile):

normalize-profile --ignore-noisy-fields foo.mobileprovision

Shorten certificate data to reduce diff size (useful for large diffs):

normalize-profile --shorten-certs foo.mobileprovision

Ignore profiles that are invalid for some reason:

normalize-profile --ignore-invalid foo.mobileprovision

See all current options with normalize-profile --help

First you need to tell git to treat mobileprovision files differently by adding it to your global attributesfile:

If you already have a global attributesfile you can see it's path with:

git config --global core.attributesfile

If you do add this line to the existing file:

*.mobileprovision diff=provision

Otherwise create a new file with this contents and configure git to read it:

echo "*.mobileprovision diff=provision" >> ~/.gitattributes
git config --global core.attributesfile ~/.gitattributes

The configure git with the command to use:

git config diff.provision.textconv normalize-profile

NOTE: You can add any of the flags from the Usage section to this command like this:

git config --global diff.provision.textconv "normalize-profile --ignore-noisy-fields"

To remove this config run:

git config --global --remove-section diff.provision