Getting Started

You can use the Qt Installer Framework to create installation programs for all kinds of applications, including (but not limited to) applications built with Qt.

Supported Platforms

You can use the Qt Installer Framework to create installers for all platforms supported by desktop Qt.

If you use Linux, install also Platform Plugin dependencies.

Building from Sources

The following steps describe how to build the Qt Installer Framework yourself. You can skip this if you have downloaded a pre-built version of the framework.

Supported Compilers

You can compile the Qt Installer Framework with Microsoft Visual Studio 2019 and newer, GCC 9 and newer, and Clang 13.0.0 and newer. Currently, the tested combination for Windows is Qt 6.6.0 with MSVC 2019 (Windows 10).

Configuring Qt

If you use a statically built Qt to build the Qt Installer Framework you do not have to deliver Qt libraries, which enables you to distribute installers as one file. For more information about statically linking against OpenSSL libraries, see SSL Import and Export Restrictions.

The supported Qt version is 6.6.0.

Get Qt sources:

\l{https://wiki.qt.io/Building_Qt_6_from_Git}{Get Qt sources from git}.
Call init-repository with --module-subset=qt5compat, qtbase, qtdeclarative, qttools, qttranslations

Configuring Qt for Windows

Use the following configuration options for Windows:

configure -prefix %CD%\qtbase -release -static -static-runtime -accessibility -no-icu -no-sql-sqlite -no-qml-debug -nomake examples -nomake tests

Configuring Qt for Linux

Use the following configuration options for Linux:

configure -prefix $PWD/qtbase -release -static -accessibility -qt-zlib -qt-libpng -qt-libjpeg -qt-pcre -no-glib -no-cups -no-sql-sqlite -no-feature-gssapi -no-qml-debug -no-opengl -no-egl -no-xinput2 -no-sm -no-icu -nomake examples -nomake tests -no-libudev -bundled-xcb-xinput -qt-harfbuzz -qt-doubleconversion

Configuring Qt for macOS

Use the following configuration options for macOS:

configure -prefix $PWD/qtbase -release -static -accessibility -qt-zlib -qt-libpng -no-cups -no-sql-sqlite -no-qml-debug -nomake examples -nomake tests -no-freetype

Build Qt:

cmake --build . --parallel
cmake --install .

Third Party Dependencies

The Qt Installer Framework sources contain a redistribution of parts of the libarchive compression and archive library, which requires you to link against the following libraries; liblzma, zlib, libbzip2, and on macOS, libiconv.

To enable the use of libarchive, add the libarchive configuration feature to the list of values specified by the CONFIG variable. Installers created with this configuration support the creating and extracting of 7zip, zip, and tar archive files, with gzip, bzip2, and xz as available compression methods.

qmake CONFIG+=libarchive

You can use the IFW_ZLIB_LIBRARY, IFW_BZIP2_LIBRARY, IFW_LZMA_LIBRARY, and IFW_ICONV_LIBRARY variables to specify the exact library files.

If you add the -qt-zlib configuration to the Qt version used to build the Qt Installer Framework, and IFW_ZLIB_LIBRARY variable is empty, libarchive will try to use the zlib library compiled into the QtCore module, which removes the need for an external library.

If you do not enable libarchive support, the builtin LZMA SDK library will act as a fallback and installation of the extra dependencies will not occur, but created installers will only support the 7zip format.

Installing Dependencies for Windows

You can download the source archives for the dependencies from:

• https://tukaani.org/xz/
• https://zlib.net/
• https://www.sourceware.org/bzip2/

When building the third party libraries with MSVC, make sure to use the same version that you used to build Qt, and that the compiler option used to select the run-time library matches the configuration options for Qt (debug/release, static/dynamic runtime).

Installing Dependencies for Linux

The required third party compression libraries are likely available from your distribution's package manager repositories.

For example, on Ubuntu 18.04 you can invoke the following to install the development packages containing headers for the libraries:

sudo apt install zlib1g-dev liblzma-dev libbz2-dev

Installing Dependencies for macOS

The easiest way to install the missing libraries is with a third party package manager solution, like Homebrew or MacPorts. On macOS 10.15 you should only need to additionally install the liblzma library.

On Homebrew this would be:

brew install xz

Troubleshooting

For libarchive related compilation errors, you may need to edit the definitions in a configuration header file respective to your platform. You can find this file in the src/libs/3rdparty/libarchive/config/ directory of the Installer Framework sources.

Setting up Qt Installer Framework

1. Clone the Qt Installer Framework source code from http://code.qt.io/cgit/installer-framework/installer-framework.git/ to get the sources for the tools.
2. Build the tools by running the "qmake" from the static Qt, followed by "make" or "nmake".