HOW TO BUILD Qt 6

Synopsis

System requirements

• C++ compiler supporting the C++17 standard
• CMake
• Ninja
• Python 3

For more details, see also https://doc.qt.io/qt-6/build-sources.html

Linux, Mac:

cd <path>/<source_package>
./configure -prefix $PWD/qtbase
cmake --build .

Windows:

1. Open a command prompt.
2. Ensure that the following tools can be found in the path:

• Supported compiler (Visual Studio 2019 or later, or MinGW-builds gcc 11.2 or later)
• Python 3 ([https://www.python.org/downloads/windows/] or from Microsoft Store)

cd <path>\<source_package>
configure -prefix %CD%\qtbase
cmake --build .

More details follow.

Build!

Qt is built with CMake, and a typical configure && cmake --build . build process is used.

If Ninja is installed, it is automatically chosen as CMake generator.

Some relevant configure options (see configure -help):

• -release Compile and link Qt with debugging turned off.
• -debug Compile and link Qt with debugging turned on.

Example for a release build:

./configure -prefix $PWD/qtbase
cmake --build .

Example for a developer build: (enables more autotests, builds debug version of libraries, ...)

./configure -developer-build
cmake --build .

See output of ./configure -help for documentation on various options to configure.

The above examples will build whatever Qt modules have been enabled by default in the build system.

It is possible to build selected repositories with their dependencies by doing a ninja <repo-name>/all. For example, to build only qtdeclarative, and the modules it depends on:

./configure
ninja qtdeclarative/all

This can save a lot of time if you are only interested in a subset of Qt.

Hints

The submodule repository qtrepotools contains useful scripts for developers and release engineers. Consider adding qtrepotools/bin to your PATH environment variable to access them.

Building Qt from git

See http://wiki.qt.io/Building_Qt_6_from_Git and README.git for more information. See http://wiki.qt.io/Qt_6 for the reference platforms.

Documentation

After configuring and compiling Qt, building the documentation is possible by running

cmake --build . --target docs

After having built the documentation, you need to install it with the following command:

cmake --build . --target install_docs

The documentation is installed in the path specified with the configure argument -docdir.

Information about Qt's documentation is located in qtbase/doc/README

Note: Building the documentation is only tested on desktop platforms.