macdeployqt and third party libraries

Question

I've got an application project that depends on a couple of shared libraries that I have created myself. According to the Qt 4.6 documentation "Deploying an Application on Mac OSX":

Note: If you want a 3rd party library to be included in your application bundle, then you must add an excplicit lib entry for that library to your application's .pro file. Otherwise, the macdeployqt tool will not copy the 3rd party .dylib into the bundle.

I have added lib entries to my application's .pro file but the libraries that I have written do not get copied into the bundle when I execute macdeployqt. I have the following in my .pro file:

LIBS += -L../Libraries -lMyLib

Everything builds okay, its just when I try to run from the bundle that I run into problems i.e. "image not found" errors.

Is there a bug in macdeployqt or do I have to something more to my .pro file?

Answer 1

Did you check the .app bundle to see if the libraries are really not there?

If that's the case, I'd assume there really is a bug in macdeployqt, or it simply can't find the library you are linking. Personally I've never seen macdeployqt actually copy any needed 3rd-party libraries into the bundle.

The interesting part is that macdeployqt never ever works directly with the .pro file. It just does some stuff to the produced application bundle. And after a quick glance into the documentation this Qt 4.7 documentation page obviously proves me right:

Note: If you want a 3rd party library to be included in your application bundle, then you must copy the library into the bundle manually, after the bundle is created.

I'd assume there is a bug in the 4.6 documentation. For me macdeployqt never placed any library files in my bundle (except for the Qt* ones, of course).

I did spend a lot of time with this stuff in my past, and ended up writing a simple little (Python) script that packs everything up into my bundle, changes the library names as needed and puts everything in a .dmg file with automatic naming.

Possibly not what you wanted to hear, but it works. ;)

Answer 2

badcat is correct that the Qt 4.6 documentation has a grossly inflated view of what is possible with macdeployqt tool.

In my experience, the only things that are done by macdeployqt are:

1. Copy the Qt libraries into your app bundle in the foo.app/Contents/Frameworks/ directory
2. Adjusts the link libraries of one binary, namely foo.app/Contents/MacOS/foo (must have same name as app bundle, even if you mention another binary in Info.plist)

So, for every other binary and library you want to deploy in your app bundle, you must do the following:

1. Run macdeployqt to enjoy its useful but feebly inadequate benefits

   macdeployqt <path_to_your_nascent_app_bundle>/foo.app

2. Install your extra libraries manually

   cp <original_library_path> foo.app/Contents/Frameworks/<lib_name>

3. Find out what libraries each binary links to.

   otool -L <binary_file_name>

4. Change the internal libary paths in your binaries

   install_name_tool -change <original_library_path> @executable_path/../Frameworks/<lib_name> <binary_file_name>

I wrote a perl script that automates these steps for my application, but it's a bit too specific to my particular environment to post here.

Answer 3

https://github.com/auriamg/macdylibbundler

dylibbundler is a small command-line programs that aims to make bundling .dylibs as easy as possible. It automatically determines which dylibs are needed by your program, copies these libraries inside the app bundle, and fixes both them and the executable to be ready for distribution... all this with a single command on the teminal! It will also work if your program uses plug-ins that have dependencies too.

Answer 4

You don't need to take care about manual deployment of third-party libraries. I am uploading a patch to Qt that makes it possible to specify additional library search paths, so that the macdeployqt tool finds the third-party dependencies: https://codereview.qt-project.org/#change,47906

After this one there will be another commit that will add support for third party libraries' deployment.