CUPS doesn't hold jobs using a password, preventing iOS clients from displaying the PIN needed to release them.

[michaelrsweet]

Need to implement a short (10-30 second) hold for jobs using the job-password attribute for PIN/passcode/password printing, otherwise iOS clients won't show the PIN they generated.

Discussed in #1453

^{Originally posted by mdk6c December 10, 2025}
We are trying to implement PIN release printing in CUPS for iOS devices.

We have added the following to the bottom of our PPD file, as per the documentation.

*cupsMandatory: "job-password job-password-encryption"
*cupsJobPassword: "1111"

Our printer is visible from iOS devices and the print options sheet shows "This printer requires a PIN to print" as expected.

However, when we tap "Print" to submit the print job, no PIN is ever presented to the user via the expected iOS PIN dialog (screenshot below).

I can see from the error_log that a job password is being generated and passed along to the filters.

error_log.txt

Maybe this issue is on the iOS side, not CUPS. I'm sorry to report it as a bug. But we have found scant guidance or implementation examples for PIN printing in our research thus far.

[michaelrsweet]

I've pushed a change for this to master:

[master a4318d8] Hold jobs using job-password for 15 seconds (Issue #1456)

I did some testing from an old iPad running iOS 16.x and a current iPad running iOS 26.x I still don't get the PIN prompt which tells me something may be broken on the iOS side of things (the job-password is coming through and the job remains held long enough for iOS to query the current job state...) Will try increasing the hold time to see if it makes a difference...

[michaelrsweet]

Bumping to 60 seconds made no difference.