Deploying an Qt application does not require any C++ programming. All you need to do is to build Qt and your application in release mode, following the procedures described in this documentation.

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The SVG icon plugin is deployed if the application uses the Qt SVG module. The accessibility plugin is always deployed. To include a 3rd party library in the application bundle, copy the library into the bundle manually, after the bundle is created. To use macdeployqt tool you can open terminal and type: $ QTDIR/bin/macdeployqt /appFile.app The app file will now contain all the Qt Libraries used as private frameworks. Just to make sure you’re not misunderstanding. In general when you use QT, even with it “cross-platform”, you compile to a Windows or macOS or Linux binary,. and then your binary (in general, not because of QT though) tied to a platform — i.e. I have already compiled my application on my Mac computer, but I don't know if my application will work on other Mac computers. I don't have two Macs, also, (as far as I know) it's difficult to install Mac OS X on a virtual machine with 'legal' discs or without having to perform a process similar to building a Hackintosh, this means that I. Add Administrator Level Privileges to Your Qt Program Include the following in your project’s PRO file to have Administrator level privileges added to your program. Following should be noted while using this.

Static vs. Shared Libraries

There are two ways of deploying an application:

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• Static Linking
• Shared Libraries (Frameworks on Mac)

Static linking results in a stand-alone executable. The advantage is that you will only have a few files to deploy. The disadvantages are that the executables are large and with no flexibility (i.e a new version of the application, or of Qt, will require that the deployment process is repeated), and that you cannot deploy plugins.

To deploy plugin-based applications, you can use the shared library approach. Shared libraries also provide smaller, more flexible executables. For example, using the shared library approach, the user is able to independently upgrade the Qt library used by the application.

Another reason why you might want to use the shared library approach, is if you want to use the same Qt libraries for a family of applications. In fact, if you download the binary installation of Qt, you get Qt as a shared library.

The disadvantage with the shared library approach is that you will get more files to deploy. https://hzroqa.over-blog.com/2020/10/big-mac-index-2016-download.html. For more information, see Creating Shared Libraries.

Deploying Qt's Libraries

Unless Qt is part of the system libraries it must be redistributed with your application. The minimum is to redistribute the run-time of the libraries used by the application. However, with static linking, the Qt run-times can be compiled into the executable.

In general, you should deploy all plugins that your Qt build uses, excluding those that you have identified as unnecessary for your application and its users.

For instance, you may need to deploy plugins for JPEG support and SQL drivers, but you should also deploy plugins that your users may require, including those for accessibility. For more information about plugins, see How to Create Qt Plugins.

Applications using Qt QML also need to ship the QML modules they use.

While deploying an application using the shared library approach, you must ensure that the Qt libraries use the correct path to find the Qt plugins, documentation, translation, and so on. To do this, you can use a qt.conf file. For more information, see Using qt.conf.

Depending on configuration, compiler-specific libraries must be redistributed as well. For more information, see the platform-specific application dependencies for X11, Windows, and macOS.

Licensing

Some of Qt's libraries are based on third party libraries that are not licensed using the same dual-license model as Qt. As a result, care must be taken when deploying applications that use these libraries, particularly when the application is statically linked to them. For more information, see Third-Party Licenses Used in Qt.

Some configurations of QtNetwork use OpenSSL at run-time. Deployment of OpenSSL libraries is subject to both licensing and export restrictions. For more information, see Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) Classes.

Platform-Specific Notes

The procedure of deploying Qt applications is different for the various platforms:

See also Deploying Translations.

© 2020 The Qt Company Ltd. Documentation contributions included herein are the copyrights of their respective owners. The documentation provided herein is licensed under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License version 1.3 as published by the Free Software Foundation. Qt and respective logos are trademarks of The Qt Company Ltd. in Finland and/or other countries worldwide. All other trademarks are property of their respective owners.

macOS (previously known as OS X or Mac OS X) is Apple's operating system for the Mac line of computers. It's a UNIX platform, based on the Darwin kernel, and behaves largely similar to other UNIX-like platforms. The main difference is that X11 is not used as the windowing system. Instead, macOS uses its own native windowing system that is accessible through the Cocoa API.

To download and install Qt for macOS, follow the instructions on the Getting Started with Qt page.

Supported Versions

When talking about version support on macOS, it's important to distinguish between the build environment; the platform you're building on or with, and the target platforms; the platforms you are building for. The following macOS versions are supported.

Build Environment

The build environment on macOS is defined entirely by the Xcode version used to build your application. Xcode contains both a toolchain (compiler, linker, and other tools), and a macOS platform-SDK (headers and libraries). Together these define how your application is built.

Note: The version of macOS that you are running Xcode on does not matter. As long as Apple ships a given Xcode version that runs on your operating system, the build environment will be defined by that Xcode version.

Xcode can be downloaded from Apple's developer website (including older versions of Xcode). Once installed, choosing an Xcode installation is done using the xcode-select tool.

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You can inspect the globally selected Xcode installation using the same tool.

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The xcrun command can then be used to find a particular tool in the toolchain.

or show the platform SDK path used when building.

Target Platforms

Building for macOS utilizes a technique called weak linking that allows you to build your application against the headers and libraries of the latest platform SDK, while still allowing your application to be deployed to macOS versions lower than the SDK version. When the binary is run on a macOS version lower than the SDK it was built with, Qt will check at runtime whether or not a platform feature is available before utilizing it.

In theory this would allow running your application on every single macOS version released, but for practical (and technical) reasons there is a lower limit to this range, known as the deployment target of your application. If the binary is launched on a macOS version below the deployment target macOS or Qt will give an error message and the application will not run.

Qt expresses the deployment target via the QMAKE_MACOSX_DEPLOYMENT_TARGET qmake variable, which has a default value set via the makespec for macOS. You should not need to change this default, but if needed you can increase it in your project file:

Note: You should not lower the deployment target beyond the default value set by Qt. Doing so will likely lead to crashes at runtime if the binary is then deployed to a macOS version lower than what Qt expected to run on.

By always building against the latest available platform SDK, you ensure that Qt can take advantage of new features introduced in recent versions of macOS.

For more information about SDK-based development on macOS, see Apple's developer documentation.

Opting out of macOS behavior changes

One caveat to using the latest Xcode version and SDK to build your application is that macOS's system frameworks will sometimes decide whether or not to enable behavior changes based on the SDK you built your application with.

For example, when dark-mode was introduced in macOS 10.14 Mojave, macOS would only treat applications built against the 10.14 SDK as supporting dark-mode, and would leave applications built against earlier SDKs with the default light mode look. This technique allows Apple to ensure that binaries built long before the new SDK and operating system was released will still continue to run without regressions on new macOS releases.

A consequence of this is that if Qt has problems dealing with some of these macOS features (dark-mode, layer-backed views), the only way to opt out of them is building with an earlier SDK (the 10.13 SDK, available through Xcode 9). This is a last-resort solution, and should only be applied if your application has no other ways of working around the problem.

Architectures

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By default, Qt is built for x86_64. To build for x86_64h (Haswell). use the QMAKE_APPLE_DEVICE_ARCHSqmake variable. This is selectable at configure time:

QMAKE_APPLE_DEVICE_ARCHS can also be specified as a space-delimited list in order to build for multiple architectures simultaneously:

Additional Command-Line Options

On the command-line, applications can be built using qmake and make. Optionally, qmake can generate project files for Xcode with -spec macx-xcode. If you are using the binary package, qmake generates Xcode projects by default; use -spec macx-gcc to generate makefiles. For example:

Configuring with -spec macx-xcode generates an Xcode project file from project.pro. With qmake you do not have to worry about rules for Qt's preprocessors (moc and uic) since qmake automatically handles them and ensures that everything necessary is linked into your application.

Qt does not entirely interact with the development environment (for example plugins to set a file to 'mocable' from within the Xcode user interface).

The result of the build process is an application bundle, which is a directory structure that contains the actual application executable. The application can be launched by double-clicking it in Finder, or by referring directly to its executable from the command line, for example, myApp.app/Contents/MacOS/myApp.

If you wish to have a command-line tool that does not use the GUI for example, moc, uic or ls, you can tell qmake to disable bundle creation from the CONFIG variable in the project file:

Deploying Applications on macOS

macOS applications are typically deployed as self-contained application bundles. The application bundle contains the application executable as well as dependencies such as the Qt libraries, plugins, translations and other resources you may need. Third party libraries like Qt are normally not installed system-wide; each application provides its own copy.

A common way to distribute applications is to provide a compressed disk image (.dmg file) that the user can mount in Finder. The deployment tool, macdeployqt (available from the macOS installers), can be used to create the self-contained bundles, and optionally also create a .dmg archive. Applications can also be distributed through the Mac App Store. Qt 5 aims to stay within the app store sandbox rules. macdeployqt (bin/macdeployqt) can be used as a starting point for app store deployment.

Note: For selling applications in the macOS App Store, special rules apply. In order to pass validation, the application must verify the existence of a valid receipt before executing any code. Since this is a copy protection mechanism, steps should be taken to avoid common patterns and obfuscate the code that validates the receipt as much as possible. Thus, this cannot be automated by Qt, but requires some platform-specific code written specifically for the application itself. More information can be found in Apple's documentation.

macOS Issues

The page below covers specific issues and recommendations for creating macOS applications.

Where to Go from Here

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We invite you to explore the rest of Qt. We prepared overviews to help you decide which APIs to use and our examples demonstrate how to use our API.

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• Qt Overviews - list of topics about application development
• Examples and Tutorials - code samples and tutorials
• Qt Reference Pages - a listing of C++ and QML APIs

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© 2020 The Qt Company Ltd. Documentation contributions included herein are the copyrights of their respective owners. The documentation provided herein is licensed under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License version 1.3 as published by the Free Software Foundation. Qt and respective logos are trademarks of The Qt Company Ltd. in Finland and/or other countries worldwide. All other trademarks are property of their respective owners.