In a nutshell, the question is: I just finished my first application using Qt Creator on a computer running under Linux Ubuntu, now how do I make this available for everyone. Now follows the more detailed version ;)
I must apologize for asking this, I am aware that this question has probably been asked many times and that there is official documentation that I can read. I am just completely new to programming and I am very confused by everything I've read so far. If you are kind enough to help, please assume I know absolutely nothing :)
Here we go: I've just finished designing my first application (a scientific program) with Qt creator on my laptop which runs under Linux Ubuntu. It works fine and I'm very proud of it ;)
Here's what my project consists of: 40 header files, 42 source files, 1 pro file, 1 qrc file, 1 html file and 7 png files. In the code, I use #include for a bunch of fairly standard Qt classes (QWidget, QTextBrowser and so forth, maybe like 40 of those).
Now I'd like to make it available to other people. For Linux and Mac users, I've figured a way to do that: I can compress the folder containing my project, tell them to install Qt on their computer, then download and extract the files on their hard disk, open a terminal in the folder and run
qmake myProject.pro
qmake
make
That seems to work fine (by the way, does it matter that this is not precisely what Qt creator does? The qmake step there is qmake-qt4 myProject.pro -r -spec linux-g++ and the make step is make -w). Now, I assume there is a solution where I don't ask them to download and install something like 200Mo of Qt material. As for Microsoft Windows users, I don't have a clue.
I would be very grateful if you could explain to me in a very concrete way what I need to do. Needless to say, I'll go for the best and easiest solution, I don't need to understand everything about deployment. Many thanks in advance!
Edit: In case that's useful : I've been using Qt Creator 2.5.0 based on Qt 4.8.1 (64 bit), I'm working on a laptop with Ubuntu 12.04 64bits
For Linux and Mac users, I would compile the software for them in 32 and 64bit formats - no-one likes compiling unknown software from source. Obviously keep the source code option for those on more unusual architectures/OSs (and provide a shell script for them that mimics the commands Qt Creator calls!). As Qt runtimes are available from package managers on just about every distro (and come pre-installed on most anyway, KDE requires them for example), by not asking them to compile from source your users will have a much smaller download (if any) and won't require them to download software from a website potentially unknown to them. Of course the best way would be to try to get your software added as a package into the major distros' repositories, but that may take some time to organise.
Compile your software for Windows users for both 32 and 64bit formats. It's generally frowned upon to ask users to download runtime libraries they potentially don't know, and put them into their system32 folder... So most applications bundle all the libraries they need with their application. Qt-based applications are no different, and so put the runtimes into the folder where the executable is. Also it is much more professional to create a proper installer, there are a few free installer applications for Windows, a web search will give you the most popular (I think I saw a thread on SO about it as well).
As you can see the platforms aren't too dissimilar, the main point I would make is: Do not force people to compile from source! The vast majority of people on Earth do not even know what compiling is, so provide for the major arrchitectures/OSs yourself.
Related
Ok, this is indeed a newbish question but I have to take a first step somewhere.
I've just had experience with DevC++ console applications, which means a simple .exe would be produced from the compiling, running from cmd. That was all, you could send the .exe to a gentleman running the same OS and he could run your little program.
What happens with Qt Creator projects, though? I've finally finished my dekstop application, wrote and debugged everything that needed to be done, I sort of have some nice GUI going, everything's working nice but... How do I acually give it to other people that don't have QtC to run it through?
Any guide that covers this?
Deployment
Here are some guides helping you to deploy your application on different platforms:
X11
Windows
Mac OS X
Embedded Linux
Symbian
Installation
I can highly recommend
NSIS
Inno Setup
Distribution
Have a look at this site. Here you can present your application to others and let them download it.
The subject of your question is simple, but I'm sure it will help many people! Your question is a good contribution.
Well, last thing you do is find out dependencies - shared libraries, and squeeze that all into installer. :)
Resources:
Qt has a nice page called Deploying an Application on Windows, as a part of their documentation. So all the dependencies related stuff is covered there.
List of best free installers is available here.
My suggestion is to invest some time in writing a CMake script and then using CPack for the distribution.
Here is a very simple example
http://www.cmake.org/Wiki/BundleUtilitiesExample
with this you are able to deploy a mac application. Then you can also extend it to create Debian or RPM packages!
The CMake mailing list is always a source of useful suggestion.
In windows you probably have to redistribute the Qt DLL with your program, as well as for Mac you have to include Qt libraries in your bundle.
We have a website that we are planning to distribute in a device. It is basically a big web site with lots of pictures and information. The web site is already built using some flash and javascript. I am thinking on using ubuntu for this. My plan is to install ubuntu( server, maybe!) without a graphical enviroment( Gnome, KDE, etc...) and start a browser like firefox using X servers. I have already tried this using
Code:
xinit firefox
It works and loads firefox fine. I am also thinking to build a Simple UI that will be launched at start. This UI will have a button to start this website and maybe other programs.
I hope I made myself clear.
I would like to know what do you guys think about this? Does it sound like something feasible? Do you think its a good idea to do this way? Do you have any suggestions?
It terms of licensing I don't understand well. I know ubuntu is licensed mainly under GNU GPL and I know is open source. I know that you are required to have any modifications available. However I am not sure if that includes the source code for the web site or any other proprietary application that i create and include. My understanding is that you only need to have open source any changes made to the OS but not any configuration after it has been installed.
What about Qt which is liscenced GNU LGPL v. 2.1? Do i need to release the code for the UI i make or is it only the code for any changes made to Qt itself?
Thanks in advance to anyone that reads this. I have read a lot on this but I am not so sure i got it right. I would like to know if I am at least in the right path.
Any help will be appreciated.enter code here
Ubuntu is GPL - if you make any changes to the Ubuntu (or rather linux) kernel itself then you have to offer those changes to anyone you distribute Ubuntu to - that has nothing to do with any applications or data you use on the operating system.
Qt is LGPL - you can use Qt to make any application you want without releasing anything about your application. You only have to release any modifications you make to the Qt source code yourself - which you are unlikely to do.
You don't need Qt for any of this, you can have a browser run full screen at startup in Ubuntu (or any other linux), and you can have a simple start page which will also start other local apps with just html - this may be a lot easier.
There are also "kiosk modes" for most browsers which limit what features and tool bars are present so you can prevent users quitting the browser or loading/saving other data.
Finally check out xubuntu - it's a version of ubuntu with X but without Gnome or KDE
IANAL, but with LGPL you can dynamically link to Qt and not be required to license your own sources under LGPL.
The general rule of thumb is that your end user should be able to take code of LGPLed component, make modifications to it, and have your proprietary code work with it. This also means you can link statically to LGPLed code if you provide at least object files of your own code, so they can be relinked.
For linux I suspect the answer is yes as well, but I can't say anything specific.
I've been coding with Python and C++ and now need to work on building a gui for data visualization purposes. I work on Mac Snow Leopard (intel), python 3.1 using gcc 4.2.1 (from Xcode 3.1)
I wanted to first install Qt and then PyQt. And my goals are to be able to:
- quickly prototype GUI and the accompanied logic that drives the GUI using PyQt and python
- if I decided I need the speed, or if it's fairly easy to translate my GUI into C++ using the Qt tools, I have the options to translate my app into C++
- Be able to deploy my application onto Windows (both the python and c++ version of my app)
Give the goals above, what are the correct steps I should take and what issues i should be aware of when setting up Qt and PyQt. Which other deployment tools do I need?
From my readings so far, here's what I have:
download the Qt source for mac and configure it with
-platform macx-g++42 -arch x86_64 -no-framework
(i've read somewhere that
building as framework causes some
trouble in deployment and/or
debugging, can't find the article
anymore)
download latest SIP source and build
download latest PyQt and build from source (any special options I should pay attention to?)
For deployment, I've read that I would need to use py2exe/cx_freeze for windows, p2app for mac:
http://arstechnica.com/open-source/guides/2009/03/how-to-deploying-pyqt-applications-on-windows-and-mac-os-x.ars
but seems like what the article describe is deploying an app you build on windows on the windows platform and vice versa. How do you deploy to windows (is it even possible?) if you are writing your Qt app on a mac ?
Really appreciate the help
I'm guessing by deploying, you mean a compiled version to users that have no Python or Qt or anything.
I'm been trying py2app for a while now and never really worked out for me. You can try PyInstaller. It worked out pretty well for me since it's made to work with plugins like PyQt and PIL etc. I put up some instructions here
http://tech.xster.net/tips/deploy-pyqt-applications-on-mac-os-x-with-pyinstaller/
They don't really support cross-compilation though. Just recently, they made cross-compilation for windows binaries on linux possible. If you want to spend some time hacking it, it's probably possible. But probably easier just to get a windows machine and building a binary with it.
I love applications that are able to update themselves without any effort from the user (think: Sparkle framework for Mac). Is there any code/library I can leverage to do this in a Qt application, without having to worry about the OS details?
At least for Windows, Mac and user-owned Linux binaries.
I could integrate Sparkle on the Mac version, code something for the Linux case (only for a standalone, user-owned binary; I won't mess with distribution packaging, if my program is ever packaged), and find someone to help me on the Windows side, but that's horribly painful.
It is not a complete solution, but a cross-platform (Windows, Mac, Linux) tool for creating packages for auto-updates and installing them is available at https://github.com/mendeley/Update-Installer. This tool does not deal with publishing updates or downloading them.
This was written for use with a Qt-based application but to make the update installer small, standalone and easy to build, the installer uses only standard system libraries (C++ runtime, pthreads/libz/libbz2 on Linux/Mac, Win32 API on Windows, Cocoa on Mac, GTK with fallback on Linux). This simplifies delivering updates which include new versions of Qt and other non-system libraries that your application may depend on.
Before considering this though, I would suggest:
If you are only building for two platforms, consider using standard and well-tested auto-update frameworks for those platforms - eg. Sparkle on Mac, Google's Omaha on Windows or auto-update systems built into popular install frameworks (eg. InstallShield). I haven't tried BitRock.
On Mac, the Mac App Store may be a good option. See https://bugreports.qt.io/browse/QTBUG-16549 though.
On Linux, consider creating a .deb package and a simple repository to host it. Once users have a repository set up, the system-wide software update tools will take care of checking for and installing new releases. The steps for setting up a new repository however are too complex for many new Ubuntu/Debian users. What we did, and also what Dropbox and Google have done, is to create a .deb package which sets up the repository as part of the package installation.
A few other notes on creating an updater:
On Windows Vista/7, if the application is installed system-wide (eg. in C:\Program Files\$APPNAME) your users will see a scary UAC prompt when the updater tries to obtain permissions to write to the install directory. This can be avoided either by installing to a user-writable directory (I gather that this is what Google Chrome does) or by obtaining an Authenticode certificate and using it to sign the updater binary.
On Windows Vista/7, an application .exe or DLL cannot be deleted if in use, but the updater can move the existing .exe/DLL out of the way into a temporary directory and schedule it for deletion on the next reboot.
On Ubuntu, 3rd-party repositories are disabled after distribution updates. Google works around this by creating a cron-job to re-add the repository if necessary.
Shameless plug: Fervor, a simple multiplatform (Qt-based) application autoupdater inspired by Sparkle.
Shameless plug: this a relatively old question, but I thought that it may be useful to mention a library that I created recently, which I named "QSimpleUpdater". Aside from notifying you if there's a newer version, it allows you to download the change log in any format (such as HTML or RTF) and download the updates directly from your application using a dialog.
As you may expect from a Qt project, it works on any platform supported by Qt (tested on Windows, Mac & Linux).
Links:
Website
GitHub repository
Screenshot:
Though it works a bit differently than Sparkle, BitRock InstallBuilder contains an autoupdater written in Qt that can be used independently (disclaimer, I am the original BitRock developer). It is a commercial app, but we have free licenses for open source projects.
I've developed an auto-updater library which works beautifully on Mac OS X, Linux and pretty much every Unix that allows you to unlink a file while the file is still open. The reason being that I simply extracted the downloaded package on top of the existing application. Unfortunately, because I relied on this functionality, I ran into problems on Windows as Windows does not let you unlink an open file.
The only alternative I could find is to use MoveFileEx with the replace on reboot flag, but that is awful.
However, renaming the working directory of the application works on Windows 7 and Windows XP. I haven't tried Windows Vista yet.
I have found WebUpdate to be quite useful, though it's written with the wxWidgets. But don't worry, it's a separate app which handles your updates. The steps to integrate it are pretty simple - just write two XML files and run the updater. And yes, it's cross-platform.
The advantage of it is it will automatically download and unzip/install all you required and not just provide a popup with a notification about a new version and a link to download it. Another thing you can do with it is customizable actions.
Project's main page is here, you can read the docs or take a look at the official tutorial.
The blog post Mixing Cocoa and Qt may solve the problem for the Mac platform.
You can use UpdateNode which gives you all the possibilities to update your software. It's using a cross platform Qt client and is free for Open Source!
UPDATE
Just did some further analysis on that and really like this solution:
Pros:
Free for Open Source!!! Even the client is Open Source: https://github.com/updatenode/unclient
The client is already localized in several languages
Very flexible in terms of updates. You can even update single non-binaries.
Provides additionally a way to display messages though the client.
Ready to use binaries & installer for all common Linux distributions, single Windows binary, as well as installer and a solution for Mac (which I have not tried, as I don't have a Mac)
Easy to use web service, nice statistics and update check is integrated within few minutes
Cons:
I am missing a multi-user management in the online service. Maybe they will do it in future - I will definitely suggest that in their feedback portal
The client is a GUI client only - so, you will need to shrink it down to run without a GUI frontend (maybe only necessary for people like me ;-) )
So, bottom line, as this solution is quite new, I think there is lot of potential here. I will definitely use it in my project and I am looking forward for more from them! Thumbs up!
This is an old question but there is not Squirrel in answers which is BEST SOLUTION , here is what I'm doing in qt 5.12.4 with qt quick "my qml app" you can do this in any other language
I'm doing this in windows there is mac version of squirrel too, I don't know about Linux
download nuget package explorer release
https://github.com/NuGetPackageExplorer/NuGetPackageExplorer/releases
open nuget package explorer and add this directory 'lib/net45' it doesn't matter you have a .net app or not, I did this for my qt application otherwise it won't work.
add all files into this folder specify your version in the metadata
save nupkg file
download squirrel release https://github.com/Squirrel/Squirrel.Windows/releases
add squirrel to windows environment path
open cmd and cd to directory of nupkg file
squirrel --releasify file_name.nupkg -> now inide releases folder, there should be setup.exe file which will install app and other files.
to create new version do 2,3,4,7,8 again if its an update it will create delta file which is only needed file to update, put this files into your service directory for example in updates folder of your website which you need to disable directory browsing in IIS , and to auto-update application you need to call Update.exe which is in parent folder of application root directory appdir/../update.exe --update http://yourserver.com/upates/ after application restart app should start with new version
you can find documentation for squirrel in https://github.com/Squirrel/Squirrel.Windows/blob/develop/docs/getting-started/0-overview.md and nuget package explorer here https://github.com/NuGetPackageExplorer/NuGetPackageExplorer and you can use only nuget.exe too if you don't want to use nuget package explorer which can be used for dynamic generation of versions, which can be download from https://www.nuget.org/downloads
That easy. Now you have auto-update app which will download updates from the server and auto-update app. For more info you can read documentations.
note: for iis uses https://github.com/Squirrel/OldSquirrelForWindows/issues/205
I suggest you read on plugin and how to create and use them. If your application architecture is modular and be split into different plugins. Take a look at Google Auto Update utility http://code.google.com/p/omaha/. We use this.
Thibault Cuvelier is writing a tutorial (in French) to develop an updater. I know the explanations are in French (and everyone is not understanding French), but I think this can be readable with a web translator like Google Translate. With this you will have a cross-platform updater, but you need to write it by yourself.
For what I know, the only part of the updater that is explained in the tutorial, is the file downloading part. In the case this can help you, refer to the tutorial, Un updater avec Qt.
I hope that helps.
OK, so I guess I take it as a "no (cross-platform) way". It's too bad!
I have found a solution that can be automated with built-in self-extracting patches and updates. for windows. I have started using their sdk. take a look at the massive documentation here, https://agersoftware.com/docs/ the sdk is called securesdk and comes with their app, SecureDelta sdk. does a great job on any kind of files, better results than lzma-included delta updaters
On windows applications are typically packaged as MSI, on Redhat Linux as RPM, what would be a best open source packaging method that could be used to deploy applications to all platforms including different flavors of unix and windows?
Contents would include exes, unix binaries, java jar files, user data, even database scripts to be run.
(I recognize contents would vary per destination OS, ie. binaries would be different, win exe vs unix binary etc, but for example config files may be the same or in the case of java even the bytecode jars)
Key feature I'd like the packaging to support is different users and permissions for different directories, however I recognize supporting this feature multiplatform may be very difficult.
Rather than build a package that is supposed to work across all of your platforms, which is likely impossible, you should have your build system build different packages for each target platform.
With CPack (It come with CMake) you can create packages for Windows (with NSIS), Linux (rpm and deb), and OS X with "make package". CMake also simplify cross-platform building.
For a sample you can look at avogadro's CMakeLists.txt and AvoCPack.cmake
I have a client that uses IzPack to create a single installer (it's Java-based) that installs their app on Windows, OS X and Linux.
http://izpack.org/
NSIS is an open-source solution which, as far as I know is able to build installers that run on Windows and UNIX-likes alike. However, for software deployment on Windows (especially in corporate environments) MSI is the way to go and NSIS is more of a headache.
So I wouldn't advise that you try to build a single package/installer for different platforms. But rather, as RibaldEddie indicated, multiple packages: one for each platform. That also allows to restrict the contents of the package to the files relevant to each platform.
If you'd like to support packaging for multiple distributions, I'd suggest helping the packagers for those distributions out; use some sort of well-known build system for your software (GNU's autotools or something like scons or waf), and document the build, optional dependencies, and so forth pretty well.
That way, when a Debian, Ubuntu, Red Hat, SuSE, whatever, packager comes along, they'll be able to create the package for you. You can optionally include packaging templates for one or more distributions in a separate VCS tree that is available, if you'd like.
If you are looking at packaging a closed-source/proprietary application for multiple systems, you'd probably do best to package up a .tar.gz file and document the installation process for it. You'll also want to make sure that the build process used doesn't embed any path information into the application, so that it can be run in /opt, /usr, or /usr/local, which are some popular choices for third-party add-on software.
BitRock InstallBuilder allows you to create installer packages for each one of the platforms you mentioned (as well as creating RPM, DEB, packages etc. from a single project file)