Is it possible to deploy a Qt application without

Question

I wrote an application in C++ using the Qt Creator on a Raspberry Pi 2 with Raspbian Jessie. Now I want to deploy it so I can use it on another Raspberry that has minimal functionality. That means there is no desktop-gui or qtcreator installed. I am using Raspbian Jessie Lite on that one.

I tried to follow this Documentation, but neither the static linking nor shared libraries approach works. http://doc.qt.io/qt-5/linux-deployment.html

After searchin around thoroughly it seems like this doesn't work because I have Qtcreator is "installed" instead of "built from Source". Is that assumption right?

Is it not possible to deploy my application without the build from source?

Answer 1

So, basically you want to deploy your Qt application in some other system where Qt is not installed.

Qt deployment in linux is quite a difficult process. The link that you shared is quite a knowledgeable but difficult process of deploying.

To make it a lot simpler, I would suggest to take a look into this. Here you can find an executable binary, using which you can create a standalone appimage of you Qt project which can be run in any other system (which running the same distribution of linux). You have to just input the path of the executable binary created by Qt Creator itself, the above said tool will do the rest. It will resolve all dependency and output a standalone binary of your Qt application, that can be run in other systems.

I am open to further questions. Hope this helps.

Answer 2

The prefered way to deploy a qt app on linux is to link it to shared objects from the official package distribution you target.

It has nothing to do with qdeveloper, only with the target qt libs.

On the contrary if you build qt from sources you will need to provide the shared objects.

This means: - compile it on resbery pi with the distro you are using and having both qt and dev packages installed - package it acording to that distro - install on the target after you install qt package. qt dev package is not needed any more.

Take care, also other libs are involved and the same applies to them.