From This Day

Last time when I was deploying a Qt application on MacOS X I spent several hours struggling with otool and install_name_tool to make my app see all the bundled Qt frameworks and plugins. Then I found out that there is a dedicated tool for it, called macdeployqt and, what is more, it’s nothing new. To be honest, it’s so well known that it is currently shipped together with Qt. Shame on me.

Great then, macdeployqt reduces the deployment work to one line in terminal, and time thereof to several seconds :) However, my application, apart from Qt frameworks uses other custom, self-made frameworks that depend on Qt. It seems that macdeployqt doesn’t support deploying frameworks, as it searches for application binary located in <bundle_name>/Contents/MacOS, which simply doesn’t exist in a framework bundle. So I created a simple script, called frameworkdeployqt.pl that does the dirty work of deploying frameworks written in Qt. The basic concept is:

1. you want to deploy a Qt application on MacOS X,
2. your application uses custom/self-made/third-party frameworks written in Qt,
3. all the frameworks are going to be located in <bundle_name>/Contents/Frameworks.

Then you deploy the application in two simple steps:

1. run macdeployqt to copy needed Qt frameworks to the application bundle and adjust its internal framework references,
2. run frameworkdeployqt.pl to make your custom frameworks use Qt frameworks bundled with your application. You’ll of course need perl, but it comes out of the box with MacOS X.

The script looks for non-Qt frameworks inside the bundle given as an argument (namely, it searches <bundle_name>/Contents/Frameworks for frameworks other than Qt*) and then replaces their references to Qt frameworks so that they point to the ones that macdeployqt have just copied to the bundle. For now it’s a bit dumb, i.e. it doesn’t check the existence of Qt frameworks, so if your custom framework uses other Qt modules than the application (or macdeployqt somehow failed to copy them), you’ll have to copy them manually to the bundle.

Other drawback is that you can’t create a dmg image directly using macdeployqt, but anyway, if you happen to need frameworkdeployqt.pl, that dmg would have been useless for you.

The script is available from GitHub. Enjoy!