Deploy a Qt project on linux

Question

This may be a noob question, but I have been stuck trying to work out how to statically build my qt project on linux. I tried doing what it said on http://doc.qt.io/qt-5/linux-deployment.html , but I do not understand the 1st step. When I cd to the location of my qt project and run

cd /path/to/Qt
./configure -static -prefix /path/to/Qt <otherparameters>
make

it says no such file or directory. Am I misunderstanding what paths I need to use? I want to make my qt project a stand alone executable which doesnt require the computer it is on to have qt. I have read about dynamically linking the libraries, but I dont really know what to do with that either. The deploy option is greyed out in qtcreator, is there a way to use this? Thanks

Answer 1

/path/to/Qt should be the path to Qt's sources, not your project's. That section of the documentation is about building Qt statically, which you must do before trying to statically link your application to Qt. For example, if you downloaded/cloned the sources to /home/jxb458/qt5 , then you'd replace /path/to/Qt with that:

cd /home/jxb458/qt5
./configure -static -prefix /home/jxb458/qt5/qtbase
make

Answer 2

Static linking is great when it works, but it can be an effort - I have found especially when using GUI. As Mitch said you need to actually re-build the Qt source code

I made some notes back when I was building statically quite a bit here: Notes on static building (derived from many sources) they should at least point you in the right direction - you can probably ignore the part about installing Ubuntu - the notes assume a new install.

However I have more recently returned to the dynamic linking deployment since I feel this is a better way to deploy now. You don't need to install Qt on the target machine you just need to collect the qt dlls and copy them with your application (using ldd executable-name which produces a list of dlls you need - but just take the Qt ones not the system/generic ones). For plugins you need to do a bit more (but its fairly simple). I even wrote a bash script to do this automatically (i'll send it to you if you need it), in windows there is a qt script called windeployqt (not sure why there is not a linux variant).

If I where to start again looking into deployment I would go for dynamic linking. Maybe try with a simple project to start with (like a hello world proj).