Another Qt installer(aqt)

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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.

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

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]

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>

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.

Use cases

GitHub Actions: install_qt
Docker image: docker aqtinstall
PyQt5 Tools: pyqt5-tools
Yet another comic reader: YACReader utilize on Azure-Pipelines

Media and articles

Contributor Nelson's blog article: Fast and lightweight headless Qt Installer from Qt Mirrors: aqtinstall
Lostdomain.org blog: Using Azure DevOps Pipelines with Qt
Qt Forum: Automatic installation for Travis CI (or any other CI)

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.

Milerius/aqtinstall