Deployment

Qt uses lots of modules, plugins and QML files, which may make it somewhat hard to create deployable packages manually. Fortunately, there are tools that can collect the necessary files for you.

See the general Qt documentation here, especially the platform-specific notes. Since most of the details are described there, I'll just list the commands I usually use.

Linux

Static builds

If you've manually built Qt as a static library, a simple make install will likely be enough.

You can use linuxdeployqt to create AppImages:

./linuxdeployqt-continuous-x86_64.AppImage \
    -qmldir <build dir> \
    -bundle-non-qt-libs \
    <install dir>

cp /path/to/libQt5Svg.so.5 ./lib/

./linuxdeployqt-continuous-x86_64.AppImage \
    -appimage \
    <install dir>

Windows

windeployqt
    --release
    --qmldir <build dir>
    --no-translations
    --no-opengl-sw
    <installation dir>

macOS

make creates a regular .app release. Similarly to Linux, you can use it as-is for static builds, or use macdeployqt to collect the libraries and optionally generate a DMG file.