QT docker development environment

Overview

This docker image is intended to provide a development environment for Qt. It contains qtcreator as well as the Qt libraries and tools (such as qmake etc.)

The Qt libraries and qtcreator are built from source with the script build_qt.sh. The source is obtained from the official Qt git repositories.

Installation

See the official docker documentation for a general overview of docker and how to install:

https://docs.docker.com/engine/installation/linux/

Build and launch docker image

Build the docker image

git clone https://github.com/erstrom/docker-qt.git
cd docker-qt
./docker-build.sh

During the build process, build_qt.sh will clone the Qt git repos and build the versions specified by QT_VERSION and QT_CREATOR_VERSION. If you want other versions than the default, just update Dockerfile with the desired versions (must be valid git tags in the repo's).

Create a container

Use docker run to create a container. Two wrapper scripts are included that can be used to ease the creation of containers:

docker_run_shell.sh
docker_run_qtcreator.sh

docker_run_shell.sh creates a container and sets docker COMMAND to the default bash shell. This is useful if the container is going to be customized.

docker_run_qtcreator.sh sets docker COMMAND to qtcreator. This will launch qtcreator as soon as the container is started.

The wrapper scripts invokes docker run with a few options that makes it possible for GUI applications inside the container (like qtcreator) to connect to the xorg server on the host.

Start an existing container

docker run should only be run once, so if you want to restart an already created container you should use docker start.

The below two wrapper scripts exist for docker start:

docker_start_shell.sh
docker_start_qtcreator.sh

The scripts will (re)start the containers created by the docker_run_... scripts, i.e., docker_start_qtcreator.sh will start the container created by docker_run_qtcreator.sh.