I would like to deploy for the first time my first app made with PyQt5. I found pyqtdeploy (link) to be probably what I need to do this for Windows and other platforms.
Anyway, I am following this tutorial, but, as I am completely new to deploying applications, I am not sure on one thing: do I need to download Qt for the target specific platform I need to deploy my app to? If so, am I supposed to use qmake from that Qt installation against the result of pyqtdeploy? For example: if I want to deploy to Windows, do I have to download Qt from here (and which version???)?
From the same tutorial page, this is not so clear, maybe it's obvious, but as I am a newbie in this, not for me.
No you don't need to download Qt.
When building your 'sysroot.toml' file, pyqtdeploy will download qt-everywhere-src and builds it from source.
In the built sysroot directory you can find qmake executable in "...\Qt\bin" (qmake.exe) depends on where your project files (sysroot.toml file) are.
For example if your host machine is Windows and C:\Users\username\Desktop\My_PyQtDeploy_Proj is your project folder which contains sysroot.toml, after building sysroot you can find qmake in "C:\Users\username\Desktop\My_PyQtDeploy_Proj\sysroot-win-64\Qt\bin\qmake.exe"
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So I have Visual Studio 2013 (community edition) with Qt addin installed, Qt5 libraries (32bit), and I'm trying to create an executable that is independent of all development configurations (it may use static or shared libs, I don't really care at this point).
OS: Windows 7, x64.
For doing this I changed the Solution Confguration visual studio option from Debug to Release, and add all the necessary libs in Configuration Properties -> Linker -> Input -> Additional Dependencies. The application now starts only if I run it from visual IDE, If I try to start it from the generated .exe I got The application was unable to start correctly (0xc000007b) error.
I have searched and found that this error code indicates one of the following problems:
32-bit app tries to load a 64-bit DLL (not my case I think, Qt DLLs are 32bit (I have installed using this .exe: qt-opensource-windows-x86-msvc2013-5.5.0.), and I use some other .DLLs which are also 32bit).
There are some missing DLLs. (I did copy all the necessary Qt DLLs in the same folder with the final executable).
For checking what dependencies my app requires, I opened the .exe file with Dependency Walker application, this is what it shows me:
in this list were also Qt5Multimedia.dll and Qt5SerialPort.dll, I get rid of the errors by copying the .DLLs in the same folder with the .exe.
Any ideas how to solve this?
You should never do that operation manually unless the standard procedure completely fails. There is already standard tool for Qt Windows deploymend windeployqt.
It takes care about Qt DLL dependencies, makes a copy of platforms\qwindows.dll and also it makes a copy of libraries that you cannot detect with the Dependency Walker, since image plugins and some other are loaded at runtime.
You do not even need to have your Qt bin folder in your environment PATH. The simplest deployment:
copy built exe binary to a new folder
open cmd console in that folder
call windeployqt using its full path (if it is not in the system PATH) and provide your executable, for example:
c:\Qt\Qt5.5.1-vs2013-x64\5.5\msvc2013_64\bin\windeployqt.exe application.exe
As a result you have in that folder all needed Qt DLLs. Of course you can have also issues with MSVC redistributables, but those should be deployed separately and installed once per system.
The tool windeployqt has various options. It can also take care about deployment of qml related files.
Only some 3rd party libraries should be copied manually if they are used, for example OpenSSL.
Solution:
As I got deeper, I have found this answer, after doing what that answer indicates (I actually copied all the .DLLs located in \Qt5.5.0\5.5\msvc2013\bin to the folder where my .exe is located), the error message changed from The application was unable to start correctly (0xc000007b) to Application failed to start because it could not find or load the QT platform plugin “windows”.
Searching on web for more about this error, I have found from this answer that you also need the platforms folder in the same location with the .exe (which was located in Qt5.5.0\5.5\msvc2013\plugins path). After copying that folder, the application started without any problems!!!
Now I just need to delete all unnecessary .DLLs from my application folder (Dependency Walker does not offer very useful information about this), and all the deployment is done.
I have solved the problem in the same time as describing it, so I guess I will just leave this here, may help others that have the same problem.
I've been googling for a solution to this issue and although I've found many people sharing my problem none of their solutions work for me.
I wrote a C++ application using Qt framework using Visual Studio 2010. I built and ran the application in "Release" mode from Visual Studio without issue, but when I copy that exe from the Release folder to a new destination (pretend its a new PC) it fails to run providing this error:
---------------------------
TestApplication
---------------------------
This application failed to start because it could not find or load the Qt platform plugin "windows".
Available platform plugins are: windows.
Reinstalling the application may fix this problem.
Within the executable directory I have the following file structure:
./TestApplication.exe
./libGLESv2.dll
./Qt5Core.dll
./Qt5Gui.dll
./QtWidgets.dll
./platforms/qwindows.dll
./qt.conf
All dll files were taken from the 5.0.0 build of Qt in the Qtbase folder where the libraries reside.
The qt.conf file is:
[Paths]
Plugins=.
Without it, the launch error is the same except it says "minimal" and "offscreen" are available platforms as well.
For all other people experiencing this error it seemed to be solved by creating the platforms folder and putting in the qwindows.dll. But doing that myself doesn't change any behavior.
Is there something I've done wrong? Perhaps my method of generating the .exe in the first place is wrong?
If you are using libGLESv2.dll, then you must include libEGL.dll, too.
You can't see that in depends.exe, don't know how the Qt developers managed to hide this.
If your Qt is out of the box, then both Dlls are necessary even if you are not using OpenGL.
Also, if your Qt is out of the box, you need to include also the three ic*.dll, which contain information for Unicode handling.
You can see which DLLs are needed by looking at which ones are invoked when running Debug (F5) in Qt Creator.
=Carl
The release is likely missing a library/plugin or the library is in the wrong directory and or from the wrong directory.
Qt intended answer: Use windeployqt.
Qt comes with platform console applications that will add all dependencies (including ones like qwindows.dll and libEGL.dll) into the folder of your deployed executable. This is the intended way to deploy your application, so you do not miss any libraries (which is the main issue with all of these answers). The application for windows is called windeployqt. There is likely a deployment console app for each OS.
I've attempted to follow the instructions on deploying Qt to Windows, but I am stuck on step number 1. In it, it tells you to:
cd C:\path\to\Qt
configure -static any other options you need
Unfortunately, I can't get the Qt DOS prompt to recognize the "configure" command despite attempting to use it in virtually every folder under my Qt installation. Does anyone know where this command is store? Everything else about my project is working great with Visual Studio, but I just can't seem to figure out the deployment.
I've Googled the crap out of this and tried both the Qt and the regular Windows command prompts. Any help would be greatly appreciated!
Thanks
EDIT: For clarity, I have tried dragging all of the .dlls needed to run my program (by running it and finding the ones I get errors on), but all that happens is I stop getting errors when trying to run my app. If I double click it with the .dlls in the same folder, nothing happens at all.
Are you sure you need the static Qt build? Note that you must static build the actual Qt framework for that, and only after that you can build your application.
If yes, make sure you have the Qt source code, because configure is part of the source code of Qt, it's a tool that configure the Qt build.
The step refers to path of Qt Source directory e.g. C:\QtSDK\QtSources\\
As you can see in qt5 source tree there is a file configure.bat
You need to run that with static option, so it will configure Qt for static linking.
Then you need to re-build Qt to make your new configuration to take effect.
I checked out a Qt project hosted on google code with SVN to a local folder. When I opened it on Qt Creator, it managed to compile the project, but when it tried to run the compiled program, an error message came up on the application output:
The process could not be started!
What is wrong?
I solved this problem by going to projects>run settings and manually specifying the executable. Found this solution by googling, don't know if it's the proper way to fix this.
I assume you tried to run it manually and not from the IDE by pressing Ctrl+R, and I assume that it works when you're running it from the IDE. If that's the case, the problem is that the compiled application requires the Qt libraries and the runtime loader can't find them. When deploying the app, you need to copy the Qt libraries it links against to the application folder (on Windows), or you need to copy them to the app directory and launch it via a wrapper script which adds that directory to LD_LIBRARY_PATH (on Linux.)
I've got a Qt app that I need installed on a customers computer, which I can't assume has Qt installed on it. I'm on a Mac OSX and the computer I will be installing it on some Unix based system. I will be installing it myself so I don't need a GUI installation wizard or anything like that. Ideally I'd like to end up with a script or makefile, along with a folder of all the sources and necessary libraries, I just don't know where to start. References would be much appreciated, I haven't found anything useful after many google searches.
My question lies somewhere between these two:
Can you create a setup.exe in qt to install your app on a client computer?
Create Linux install for Qt application?
I don't need a full-blown install wizard (question 1), but I also won't have my machine at the installation site to just keep copying libraries until all dependencies are met (question 2). Basically I need to have everything on a CD ready to install when I get there. Thanks in advance.
There are two ways to install a Qt application on a system:
1 - You can compile Qt statically. This will allow you to deploy you app without any qt dependencies.
2 - You need to deploy your app with Qt librairy files you need (like qtcore.dll on Windows)
You will find all explications for each platform in the Qt documentation : http://qt-project.org/doc/qt-4.8/deployment.html.
To create installer you can use InstallJammer for Windows and Unix.
For MacOSX you need to create a dmg image. This is very simple. Read the following web page for help : http://www.wikihow.com/Make-a-DMG-File-on-a-Mac. By using apple script you can customize dmg (like an Application folder link into the dmg).
My preference for Win32 installer is NSIS.
Hope that helps!
Not sure why you want to avoid the install wizard. It can also help you create Uninstaller, desktop and start menu shortcuts, etc. As mentioned in the posts you refer to, you could use BitRock InstallBuilder (Nokia uses it for Qt Creator)
If you do not want to use a wizard and don't want to compile statically, then you can bundle Qt libraries in the same folder as the app and setup a shell script that sets the LD_LIBRARY_PATH to that directory