I prefer to build Qt from source. I have been trying to build Qt 4.8.5 on Mac OS X 10.9 (Mavericks). I managed in the end, but it took a few tweaks. Online information about how to do this was fragmentary, so I am documenting it here in case it is useful to someone else.

• Qt For Mac
• Qt Designer Mac
• Build Qt For Mac Installer
• Mac Install Qt

Qt Designer is a tool for quickly building graphical user interfaces with widgets from the Qt GUI framework. It gives you a simple drag-and-drop interface for laying out components such as buttons, text fields, combo boxes and more. Qt documentation: Deploying on Mac. Qt offers a deployment tool for Mac: The Mac Deployment Tool. The Mac deployment tool can be found in QTDIR/bin/macdeployqt.It is designed to automate the process of creating a deployable application bundle that contains the Qt libraries as private frameworks.

1. Webkit doesn’t build. I don’t need it so I disabled it using configure option:

-no-webkit

2. The corewlan plugin doesn’t build. I don’t need it (I think, I’ve never heard of it before) so I disabled it using this fix from stackoverflow.

3. The TIFF image format plugin doesn’t build. I don’t need it so I disabled it using configure option:

-no-libtiff

My final configure command was:

./configure -nomake demos -nomake examples -debug-and-release -no-multimedia -no-audio-backend -no-phonon -no-phonon-backend -no-gif -no-openssl -no-webkit -no-libtiff

There will be lots of warnings that Qt 4.8.5 isn’t compatible with Mac OS X 10.9. But you can ignore these (or comment out the warning in the appropriate Qt header file).

I have done some brief experiments and it seems to work ok. Hopefully there will be a Qt 4.8.6 that fixes these issues. Note that you also need to make some tweaks to your application code. See:

** UPDATE April-2014 **

Qt 4.8.6 has been released. This appears to build fine on Mac OS X 10.9.

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This article provides hints for checking out and building the Qt 5 repositories. This is primarily for developers who want to contribute to the Qt library itself, or who want to try the latest unreleased code.

If you simply want to build a specific release of Qt from source to use the libraries in your own project, you can download the source code from the Official Releases page or the Archive. Alternatively, commercial customers can download the Source Packages via the Qt Account portal.

To compile Qt 6, see Building Qt 6 from Git.

To compile Qt Creator, see Building Qt Creator from Git.

• 1System Requirements
• 2Getting the source code
• 3Configuring and Building
• 8Issues

System Requirements

All desktop platforms

• Git (>= 1.6.x)
• Perl (>=5.14)
• Python (>=2.6.x)
• A working C++ compiler

For more detailed information, see Building Qt Sources

Documentation (optional)

• Clang (>=6.x)

See Installing Clang for QDoc

SSL (optional)

See Enabling and Disabling SSL Support

For Windows, bison, flex and gperf are provided with the source code at c:pathToQtgnuwin32bin. Get Ruby from http://rubyinstaller.org/. You can download the precompiled ICU packages from download.qt.io, or see Compiling-ICU to compile your own.

Linux/X11

apt-get build-dep

Ubuntu/Debian based systems have a convenient way of installing build-depends for any package:

RPM-based distros with yum offer a similar tool called yum-builddep.

Note: if you see the following error message while running the commands above on Ubuntu:

Then you will need to enable the 'Source code' option in Software and Updates > Ubuntu Software under the 'Downloadable from the Internet' section. This setting can also be found by running software-properties-gtk.

Convenience packages (Ubuntu 11.10 -- 12.10 only)

For Ubuntu/Debian, Gabor Loki has provided a custom PPA with the sedkit-env-webkit meta package that installs all required dependencies for building Qt/Qt WebKit. You can add the PPA by calling:

For other distros, get the separate components below.

Build essentials

Libxcb

Libxcb is now the default window-system backend for platforms based on X11/Xorg, and you should therefore install libxcb and its accompanying packages. Qt5 should build with whatever libxcb version is available in your distro's packages (but you may optionally wish to use v1.8 or higher to have threaded rendering support). The README lists the required packages.

OpenGL support

For Qt Quick 2, a graphics driver with native OpenGL 2.0 support is highly recommended.

Accessibility

It is recommended to build with accessibility enabled, install libatspi 2 and libdbus-1 development packages.

Qt WebKit

Qt WebEngine

Qt Multimedia

You'll need at least alsa-lib (>= 1.0.15) and gstreamer (>=0.10.24) with the base-plugins package.

QDoc Documentation Generator Tool

macOS

Install the latest Xcode from the App Store. Verify that your Xcode install is properly set up for command line use:

This should give you eg:

You can verify that the right Xcode is being used by running:

If this points to /Developer you're probably using an older Xcode version. Switch to the latest one by running:

Windows

Windows Graphics Drivers

The full feature set of Qt Quick 2 requires OpenGL 2.1 or higher or OpenGL ES 2.0 to work. Several options are available:

1. Using the native OpenGL driver for your graphics card (Note: The stock Windows driver only supports OpenGL 1.1, which is insufficient).
2. Using the ANGLE-library to translate OpenGL calls into DirectX. A copy of ANGLE is bundled in Qt 5.
3. Using a software rasterizer shipped in the Qt SDK. See MesaLlvmpipe for instructions on how that is built.

Starting with Qt 5.8, many Qt Quick applications can also be run with the built-in software backend (previously known as the Qt Quick 2D Renderer). This is not the same as running through a full OpenGL software rasterizer, and is a lot more lightweight. See the documentation on how to request a specific backend.

Qt can be built to dynamically choose the OpenGL implementation (see Dynamically Loading Graphics Drivers) by passing the option -opengl dynamic to configure. To build Qt to always use the native OpenGL driver, pass -opengl desktop. To build Qt to always use ANGLE, pass -opengl es2.

ANGLE dependencies

• MSVC
  • Qt < 5.12: Building ANGLE with Windows SDKs prior to Windows Kit 8 requires the DirectX SDK to be installed, and the path to the d3d_compiler<xx>.dll to be added to the PATH variable.
  • Qt >= 5.12: Qt needs at least a Windows 10 SDK in order to build ANGLE. No additional manual setup is needed

• MinGW
  • Building ANGLE with Windows SDKs prior to Windows Kit 8 requires the DirectX SDK to be installed, and the path to the d3d_compiler<xx>.dll to be added to the PATH variable.

Any project that uses run-time shader compilation must have D3DCOMPILER_xx.DLL copied to the local executable path for the project. This DLL is available in this sub-directory of the Windows SDK installation under %ProgramFiles(x86)%Windows Kits<version>RedistD3D<arch> where <arch> is x86 and x64 (see [1]).

Supported Compilers on Windows

• Visual Studio 2019
• Visual Studio 2017 (might need a recent service pack, especially for QtWebEngine)
• MinGW-w64 based compiler with g++ version 7.3 or higher (e.g. MinGW-builds, see also MinGW-64-bit).

Notes:

• Add the compiler to the PATH environment variable. Visual Studio usually ships .bat files named vcvarsall.bat or similar that can be called with a command line parameter for choosing the toolchain (/x86, /x64, etc) to set up the environment.
• Windows SDK v6.0A/v7.0A contains the same compiler as Visual Studio 2008/2010.
• Windows SDK 8.0 and later do not include a compiler.
• As of 16.3.2012, if you wish to install both Visual Studio 2010 and the standalone SDK, you need to follow this order (see readme.html provided with the service pack):
  1. Install Visual Studio 2010
  2. Install Windows SDK 7.1. See also the Cannot Install Windows SDK page.
  3. Install Visual Studio 2010 SP1
  4. Install Visual C++ 2010 SP1 Compiler Update for the Windows SDK 7.1

Windows Build environment

We recommend creating a command prompt that provides the build environment (see the Qt Creator README ). In this environment, Python (e.g. Active Python 2.7 later) and Perl (e.g. StrawberryPerl 5.12 or later) should be in the PATH.Ruby is required for WebKit.

Hint: If you installed git with the non-recommended setting to add git's entire Unix environment to PATH, make sure that Perl is added to the path in front of git, since that ships an incompatible build of perl, which would cause the scripts to fail. Also, MinGW builds of Qt become Msys builds due to the presence of sh.exe; and those who've tried have had more success configuring and building for MinGW in MS's cmd.exe Command Prompt than in the Git Bash shell.

Multicore building: To speed up building when using nmake, the compiler can be instructed to use all available CPU cores in one of the following ways:

• Pass the option -mp to Qt's configure
• Set the environment variable CL (specifying Visual Studio compiler options) to /MP (On the command line: set CL=/MP)
• Use the tool jom instead of nmake. (Using jom instead of nmake reduces compile time quite a bit)

Configuring Visual Studio 2013 on Windows 8, 8.1 & 10

Setting the environment variables to properly build Qt can be done by following the steps below:

• Create a file called qt5vars.bat, paste the following inside it and save it

Hint: Remember to change <arch> to your desired platform and double-check that the paths are correct for Qt and Visual Studio

Qt For Mac

Complete the steps below after you have cloned Qt5 from Git

• After having cloned Qt5 from Git (assuming it's at C:Qt5), move qt5vars.bat to the Qt5 folder
• Double-click on the script to run it. Once it runs the script, the command prompt will stay open to enter additional commands.
• Navigate to C:Qt5 in the command prompt

The working directory should be c:Qt5.

All the required environment variables are now correctly set up and building Qt5 with nmake should work now. You have to run qt5vars.bat and use the command prompt every time you build Qt5 with nmake.

The above steps also work for setting up nmake to build jom.

Configuring MinGW on Windows 8, 8.1 & 10

The configuration process is similar to above except for a few minor changes in the qt5vars.bat script:

ICU on Windows

Qt 5 can make use of the ICU library for UNICODE and Localization support. This is required for building Qt WebKit. You can use pre-compiled versions of ICU with a Visual Studio 2010 dependency from the website, get pre-compiled versions for different compilers from download.qt.io, or compile ICU on your own.

The absolute paths of include and lib folders of the ICU installation must be passed with -I and -L option to Qt's configure. In addition, uic.exe needs to find the ICU DLLs during compilation, for which the lib folder of the ICU installation must be added to the PATH environment variable.

At run-time, the ICU DLLs need to be found. This can be achieved by copying the DLLs to the application folder or adding the lib folder of the ICU installation to the PATH environment variable.

Getting the source code

First clone the top-level Qt 5 git repository:

or (if you're behind a firewall and want to use the https protocol):

Then check out the target branch (see Branch Guidelines):

Getting the submodule source code

As described in the README.git, initialize the repository using the init-repository script, which clones the various sub-modules of Qt 5.

Relevant options for init-repository:

• --module-subset=default,-qtwebengine : Consider skipping the web module (Qt WebEngine) by passing this option. It is quite big and takes a long time to compile (and is often a source of compile errors), so it is recommended to only download it if you intend to use it. You can always re-run init-repository later on to add it.
• --branch : Check out the branch tips instead of the SHA1s of the latest successful integration build.
• --codereview-username <Jira/Gerrit username> : If you plan to contribute to Qt, you may specify your codereview username (pay attention to capitalization!) so that the git remotes are properly set up. Note that it is recommended to adjust your ssh configuration instead.

In order to build a specific release of Qt, you can checkout the desired tag:

Note:init-repository is currently unable to initialize tags that are too old. An alternative way to build a specific release or branch of Qt5 (although without linking of the gerrit account for code reviewing) is to use git submodule update --init in place of the init-repository script. That translates to:

More information can be found in Get The Source.

Configuring and Building

The Qt5 build system should be fairly resilient against any 'outside distractions' - it shouldn't matter whether you have other Qt versions in PATH, and QTDIR is entirely ignored. However, make sure that you have no qmake-specific environment variables like QMAKEPATH or QMAKEFEATURES set, and the qmake -query output does not refer to any other Qt versions ($HOME/.config/Qt/QMake.conf should be empty).

For more configure options, see Qt Configure Options.

Note: To build qdoc and Qt documentation in future you should set LLVM_INSTALL_DIR environment variable pointing to directory where LLVM is installed (it should be top level directory, the configuration scripts use relative path tracing from this directory). For example, in Linux with LLVM installed in isolated directory (/usr/llvm), at a bash prompt:

A build script called configure (or configure.bat for Windows) will be in the directory that you git cloned the source code into (~/qt5 if you followed the directions above). You will want to call that script from a different, parallel-level directory, because (unless you are using a Qt Autotest Environment) you do not want to build Qt in the directory that holds the source code. Instead, you should use a 'shadow build,' meaning you should not build into the source directory.

For Linux / macOS, to install in ~/qt5-build (an arbitrary name), assuming you are in ~:

For Windows, again assuming you are in ~:

The -developer-build option causes more symbols to be exported in order to allow more classes and functions to be unit tested than in a regular Qt build. It also defaults to a 'debug' build, and installs the binaries in the current directory, avoiding the need for 'make install'. '-opensource' sets the license to be GPL/LGPL. The -nomake examples and -nomake tests parameters make sure examples and tests aren't compiled by default. You can always decide to compile them later by hand.

Some Hints

1. You can add -confirm-license to get rid of the question whether you agree to the license.
2. On Windows, you might not be able to build if sh.exe is in your PATH (for example due to a git or msys installation). Such an error is indicated by qt5-srcqtbasebinqmake.exe: command not found and alike. In this case, make sure that sh.exe is not in your path. You will have to re-configure if your installation is already configured.
3. If you are planning to make contributions with git, it is advised to configure and build the source in a separate directory so the binaries are not seen by git. This can be done by navigating to the desired build directory and calling configure/make in that directory. (But shadow builds are discouraged in Qt Autotest Environment.)
   1. Note: If you do a shadow build, follow the instructions above for creating a build directory that is parallel to the source directory. Do NOT make the build directory a subdirectory of the source tree. The build will probably fail in weird ways if the build directory is not exactly parallel to the source directory.

Now trigger the build from within the build directory by running:

For Windows (MSVC), choose one of the following, depending on your setup/environment:

or

or

Or only build a specific module, e.g. declarative, and modules it depends on:

Building Qt WebKit

Windows

WebKit.org has instructions for building WebKit on Windows. ICU is required for building.

The tools bison, flex and gperf which are required for building are provided for convenience in the folder gnuwin32bin. If you are using shadow builds, you must add this directory to your PATH, else no special actions need to be done manually in order to use them.

Installing (Linux / OS X)

• Note: Installation is only needed if you haven't used the configure options -developer-build or -prefix '%PWD%/qtbase'. Otherwise, you can just use Qt from the build directory.

To install, run

Cleaning

To get a really clean tree use:

since make confclean no longer works from the top-level of the repo.

Getting updates

To update both the qt5.git repo as well as the submodules to the list of revisions that are known to work, run

In addition, you should pass the same parameters to init-repository as you did in Getting the source code.

Unlike a 'normal' git submodule update, this ensures that any changes to the module structure are automatically pulled as well.

If you are planning to do nightly builds, consider using the script qt5_tool that lives in qtrepotools/bin. It provides options for updating the repository, cleaning and building. For example, qt5_tool -u -c -b can be used to clean, update and build. qt5_tool -p -c -b would be used to pull all modules to the head of their master branches.

Depending upon what changed in the source since it was last updated you might have to run configure again. The safe thing to do is to always run config.status -recheck-all in the build directory after updating.

• Hint1: The submodule update does a checkout in submodules, potentially hiding any local commits you've done. If the latter happened to you (and you haven't been working with branches anyhow), git reflog is your friend.
• Hint2: When creating scripts for updates on Windows, note that git clean often fails if some process locks a file or folder.

Using latest branches in the submodules

By default, the checkout will not contain the latest stable/dev branches of each individual submodule repository, but a combination of versions that are known to work together. If you want to get the absolute latest stuff you can do so on a per-module basis, e.g.

or tell init-repository to check out branches in all repositories:

Some Unix shell tricks for developing Qt can be useful when you are making or reviewing changes in multiple modules.

Issues

Linux

configure fails with 'No QPA platform plugin enabled!' (Linux)

Qt Designer Mac

You should install the libxcb and it's accompanying packages, see 'System Requirements'.

configure fails with errors like 'cannot stat file ...'

Your perl version is too old, Qt 5 beta1 needs at least 5.14.

configure fails to enable qdoc on Debian

Debian allows parallel installs of libclang-<version>-dev in /usr/lib/llvm-<version> so LLVM_INSTALL_DIR should be /usr/lib/llvm-<version> to build qdoc. Not /usr/llvm.

qmlscene segfaults 'Cannot create platform GL context, none of GLX, EGL, DRI2 is enabled' (Linux)

Try installing the libx11-xcb-dev package:

afterwards you have to re-run configure and force qtbase/src/plugins/platforms/xcb to recompile.

WebKit doesn't compile, missing ICU

Currently there is no configure time check for ICU, so install it through the package manager through

on Ubuntu/Debian:

on Fedora:

• You can also compile Qt without Qt WebKit by deleting / renaming the qtwebkit, qtwebkit-examples-and-demos directories.
• The --no-webkit option of configure added, see QTBUG-20577 issue.

Build Qt For Mac Installer

Qt D-Bus fails to build due to 'inconsistent user-defined literal suffixes'

This occurs when you attempt to build Qt 5 with GCC 4.7 while D-Bus < 1.4.20 is present on your system. (For example, the default Fedora 17 installation is prone to this error.) The error message is this:

Note: The error is in the header files of D-Bus itself, and it has been fixed upstream, see https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=46147.

Solution: either upgrade to a newer version of D-Bus or edit that one line of the header file manually.

...::isNull is not defined (from qvariant_p.h)

C++11 support is detected while your GCC doesn't properly support it. Fixed by passing -no-c11 to the configure options.

cc1: fatal error: .pch/release-shared/QtGui: No such file or directory

Currently unresolved bug with the build of assembly files, see discussion at http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lib.qt.devel/5933
Fixed by passing -no-pch to the configure options.

ld: hidden symbol `void QQmlThread::postMethodToThread<QQmlDataBlob*, QQmlDataBlob*, QQmlDataLoaderThread>(void (QQmlDataLoaderThread::)(QQmlDataBlob), QQmlDataBlob* const&)' isn't defined

Bug with GCC versions < 4.4.x, see bug report at https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=493929. Fixed by adding QMAKE_CXXFLAGS_RELEASE *= -fno-inline in qtdeclarative/src/qml/qml.pro.

Touchscreen (or Wacom tablet) doesn't work

Qt depends on having libxi (including development headers), supporting XInput protocol 2.2 or higher, available at build time in order to have multi-touch support. Otherwise configure will fall back to XInput 2.0 which does not support touchscreens. To prove that is the problem, try this:

and try your Qt application again. At startup, Qt will enumerate the input devices available, like this

If it does not say Qt supports 2.2 or greater, it means the headers weren't available when Qt was built, so the support for touch was not included. If you do have 2.2 or greater but it doesn't say it's a touchscreen at the end, there may be some other problem such that the touchscreen is not recognized, and you may want to write up a bug, after verifying that touch works in other X11 applications.

Windows

Note that if you're shadow-building Qt, the source directory and build directory must be on the same drive, nested equally deeply. Also, make sure there are no old build artifacts in the source directory.

Mac Install Qt

Debugging OpenGL issues (Windows)

Set the environment variable QT_QPA_VERBOSE=gl:1 and run the application with DebugView installed. The log will show the requested vs obtained OpenGL version. If the log tells you that it only has OpenGL 1.1, Qt Quick 2 will not work. Note that qmlscene will not report errors about unsupported OpenGL versions.

Questions and comments

Please raise questions & comments about this article in this forum thread.