aqtinstall 1.0.0

Another unofficial Qt installer

Another Qt installer(aqt)

• Release:

• Documents:

• Test status:

This is a utility alternative to the official graphical Qt installer, for using in CI environment where an interactive UI is not usable such as Github Actions, Travis-CI, CircleCI, Azure-Pipelines, AppVeyor and others.

It can automatically download prebuilt Qt binaries for any target (you’re not bound to Linux binaries on Linux; you could also download iOS binaries). It’s working with Python > 3.5 on Linux, OS X and Windows.

When installing QtBase package on proper platforms (eg. install linux package on linux), aqt update Qt binaries(eg. qmake, and libQt5Core.so/Qt5Core.dll/Freamework.QtCore), and change configurations(qt.conf, and qconfig.pri) to make it working well with installed directory(Qt prefix).

License and copyright

This program is distributed under MIT license.

Qt SDK and its related files are under its licenses. When using aqtinstall, you are considered to agree upon Qt licenses. aqtinstall installs Qt SDK as of a (L)GPL Free Software.

For details see Qt licensing and Licenses used in Qt5

Requirements

• Minimum Python version: 3.6

• Recommended Python version: 3.7.5 or later

• Dependent libraries: requests, py7zr

Install

Same as usual, it can be installed with pip

$ pip install aqtinstall

Usage

General usage looks like this:

aqt [-h][--help][-O | --outputdir <directory>][-b | --base <mirror url>][-E | --external <7zip command>] \
    install <qt-version> <host> <target> [<arch>] [-m all | -m [extra module] [extra module]...] [--internal]
    [--archives <archive>[ <archive>...]] [--timeout <timeout(sec)>]

You can also call with python -m aqt syntax as well as command script aqt.

• The Qt version is formatted like this: 5.11.3

• Host is one of: linux, mac, windows

• Target is one of: desktop, android, ios (iOS only works with mac host)

• For some platforms you also need to specify an arch:

  • For windows, choose one of:

    • win64_msvc2019_64, win32_msvc2019,

    • win64_msvc2017_64, win32_msvc2017,

    • win64_msvc2015_64, win32_msvc2015,

    • win64_mingw81, win32_mingw81,

    • win64_mingw73, win32_mingw73,

    • win64_mingw53, win32_mingw53,

    • win64_msvc2019_winrt_x64, win64_msvc2019_winrt_x86, win64_msvc2019_winrt_armv7

    • win64_msvc2017_winrt_x64, win64_msvc2017_winrt_x86, win64_msvc2017_winrt_armv7

  • For android and Qt 5.13 or below, choose one of: android_x86_64, android_arm64_v8a, android_x86, android_armv7

• You can specify external 7zip command path instead of built-in extractor.

• When specifying all for extra modules option -m all extra modules are installed.

Installing tool and utility (Experimental)

You can install tools and utilities using following syntax;

python -m aqt [-h][--help][-O | --outputdir <directory>][-b | --base <mirror url>][-E | --external <7zip command>] \
    tool <host> <tool_name> <tool-version> <arch> [--timeout <timeout>]

• tool_name is one of tools_ifw, tools_vcredist, and tools_openssl.

• arch is full qualified tool name such as qt.tools.ifw.31 which values can be seen on Qt archive_site This is a quite experimental feature, may not work and please use it with your understanding of what you are doing.

• It does not recognize ‘installscript.qs’. When using tools which depends on a qt script, you should do something by yourself.

Target directory

aqt can take option ‘–outputdir’ or ‘-O’ that specify a target directory.

The Qt packages are installed under current directory as such Qt/<ver>/gcc_64/ If you want to install it in C:Qt as same as standard gui installer default, run such as follows:

C:\> mkdir Qt
C:\> aqt install --outputdir c:\Qt 5.11.3 windows desktop win64_msvc2019_64

Command examples

Example: Installing Qt SDK 5.12.0 for Linux with QtCharts and QtNetworkAuth:

pip install aqtinstall
sudo aqt install --outputdir /opt 5.12.0 linux desktop -m qtcharts qtnetworkauth

Example: Installing Android (armv7) Qt 5.10.2:

aqt install 5.10.2 linux android android_armv7

Example: Install examples, doc and source:

C:\ aqt examples 5.15.0 windows desktop -m qtcharts qtnetworkauth
C:\ aqt doc 5.15.0 windows desktop -m qtcharts qtnetworkauth
C:\ aqt src 5.15.0 windows desktop

Example: Install Web Assembly

aqt install 5.15.0 linux desktop wasm_32

Example: Install an Install FrameWork (IFW):

aqt tool linux tools_ifw 4.0 qt.tools.ifw.40

Example: Install vcredist:

C:\ aqt tool windows tools_vcredist 2019-02-13-1 qt.tools.vcredist_msvc2019_x64
C:\ .\Qt\Tools\vcredist\vcredist_msvc2019_x64.exe /norestart /q

Example: Install MinGW on Windows

C:\ aqt tool -O c:\Qt windows tools_mingw 8.1.0-1-202004170606 qt.tools.win64_mingw810w
c:\ set PATH=C:\Qt\Tools\mingw810_64\bin

Example: Show help message

aqt help

Environment Variables

It is users task to set some environment variables to fit your platform such as

export PATH=/path/to/qt/x.x.x/clang_64/bin/:$PATH
export QT_PLUGIN_PATH=/path/to/qt/x.x.x/clang_64/plugins/
export QML_IMPORT_PATH=/path/to/qt/x.x.x/clang_64/qml/
export QML2_IMPORT_PATH=/path/to/qt/x.x.x/clang_64/qml/

aqtinstall never do it for you because not to break multiple installation versions.

Supported CI platforms

There are no limitation for CI platform but currently it is tested on Azure Pipelines and Github actions. If you want to use it with Github actions, install_qt action will help you. If you want to use it with Azure Pipelines, blog article Using Azure DevOps Pipelines with Qt may be informative.

Use cases

• GitHub Actions: install_qt

• Docker image: docker aqtinstall

• PyQt5 Tools: pyqt5-tools

• Yet another comic reader: YACReader utilize on Azure-Pipelines

Media, slide, articles and discussions

• Contributor Nelson’s blog article: Fast and lightweight headless Qt Installer from Qt Mirrors - aqtinstall

• Lostdomain.org blog: Using Azure DevOps Pipelines with Qt

• Wincak’s Weblog: Using Azure CI for cross-platform Linux and Windows Qt application builds

• Qt Forum: Automatic installation for Travis CI (or any other CI)

• Qt Form: Qt silent, unattended install

• Qt Study group presentation: Another Qt CLI installer

History

This program is originally shown in Kaidan project as a name qli-installer. A project aqtinstall extend the original to run with standard python features with Linux, Mac and Windows, to be tested on CI platform, and to improve performance with a concurrent downloading.

aqtinstall changeLog

All notable changes to this project will be documented in this file.

Current changes

Unreleased

Added

Changed

Fixed

Deprecated

Removed

Security

v1.0.0 (4, Feb. 2021)

Added

• Add –noarchives option to allow user to add modules to existed installation(#174,#204)

• No patching when it does not install qtbase package by –noarchives and –archives option.(#204)

• Azure: test with jom build on windows.

• Patch pkgconfig configurations(#199)

• Patch libQt5Core and libQt6Core for linux(#201)

Changed

• Update document to show available Qt versions

• Update README to add more references.

• Suppress debug log and exist silently when specified package not found.

Fixed

• Catch exception on qmake -query execution(#201)

• Fix Qt6/Android installation handling.(#193, #200)

v0.11.1 (21, Jan. 2021)

Added

• Add –timeout option to specify connection timeout (default 5.0 sec) (#197)

v0.11.0 (21, Jan. 2021)

Added

• Automatically fallback to mirror site when main https://download.qt.io down.(#194, #196)

v0.10.1 (11, Dec. 2020)

Added

• Add LTS versions as known one.(#188)

Changed

• Tool: Version comparison by startswith. When specified 4.0 but download server hold 4.0.1, it catch 4.0.1.(related #187)

• README: explicitly show python version requirements.

v0.10.0 (25, Nov. 2020)

Added

• Add v5.12.2, v6.0.0 as known versions.(#176, #177)

• Support –archives option on src installation.

Changed

• Use multiprocessing.Pool instead of concurrent.futures(#178)

• Refactoring whole modules. (#179)

• Split old changelogs to CHNAGELOG_prerelease.rst

• Drop an upper limitation (<0.11) for py7zr.(#183)

Fixed

• When we used “-m all” to download doc or examples, Qt sources are also downloaded(@Gamso)(#182)

v0.9.8 (4, Nov. 2020)

Added

• Added new combinations for tools_ifw

Fixed

• When we start an installation, all packages are downloaded whatever the specified platform.(#159)