How To Compile Qt with Visual Studio

This post is a step-by-step guide on how to compile Qt 4.x.x with MSVC 2010.

Although we use Qt 4.7.1 as an example (for historical reasons), you can also find suggestions on building newer versions of Qt by MSVC 2012 and even by Intel Compiler for both platforms x86 and x64. All kudos go to numerous contributors, who spend their time to do all the tweaking and testing (see updates below).

In particular there are instructions on how to build Qt 5 for x64 platform contributed by Vincenzo Mercuri.

Updates

December 21, 2012. Vincenzo Mercuri shared instructions for building Qt 5.0.0 in x64 configuration.

December 19, 2012. Vincenzo Mercuri informed that he have compiled Qt 4.8.4-x64 by the guide. Also he shared his instructions for building Qt with Intel C++ Compiler into static library.

November 4, 2012: As reported by Mike Pelton, whatnick and Borislav Stanimirov, 32 & 64bit versions of Qt 4.8.3 have been successfully compiled by this guide, by both Visual Studio 2010 & 2012. Be aware that Qt might not be adjusted yet for Windows 8 (as reported here).

June 4, 2012: As reported by Wenqing, Qt 4.8.2 has been successfully compiled by this guide.

April 5, 2012: As reported by Snouty, 32bit version of Qt 4.8.1 has been successfully compiled by this guide.

December 20, 2011: As reported by Evon, 64bit version of Qt 4.8.0 has been successfully compiled by this guide. To do 64bit compilation, please use Visual Studio x64 Win64 Command Prompt (2010) in step 8. Also please use jom 1.06 and don’t forget to install Service Pack 1 for Visual Studio.

September 16, 2011: Qt 4.7.4 has been successfully compiled by this guide.

August 14, 2011: In order to build Qt for 64 bits just use Visual Studio x64 Win64 Command Prompt (2010) in step 8. Also install Service Pack 1 for Visual Studio 2010 beforehand – it fixes few bugs related to x64 compilation.

July 18 2011: Qt 4.7.3 and Qt 4.8 (beta) has been successfully compiled by this guide. Just replace version number where applicable.

Build instructions

Visual C++ 2010 contains all necessary SDKs for Qt compilation. However if you plan to use Qt with Phonon you need to install DirectX SDK first.
Install Perl if you are going to compile Qt >= 4.8.0
Download and extract Qt 4.7.1 Source Code. (Qt 4.8.0 or Latest snapshot).
Copy contents of the folder qt-everywhere-opensource-src-4.7.1 to the directory where you intend to install Qt. In our case this is C:Qt4.7.1.
Set up environmental variables
QTDIR=C:Qt4.7.1 QMAKESPEC=win32-msvc2010
Update PATH variable to include %QTDIR%in
Download the latest version of jom.
Extract jom files to C:Qtjom folder
Start Visual Studio 2010 Command Prompt:
Start > Programs > Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 > Visual Studio Tools > Visual Studio Command Prompt.
Run following commands in it (every line is a different command: type it then press Enter):
cd c:Qt4.7.1 configure -debug-and-release -opensource -platform win32-msvc2010 ..jomjom.exe -j N
Where N is number of CPU cores you want to utilize for Qt compilation. Larger is better.
Download and install Qt Visual Studio Add-in.
Run Visual Studio 2010. Integrate just compiled Qt to IDE using menu Qt > Qt Options > Qt Versions > Add

Usually compilation takes about 10 hours, but thanks to jom and Intel SSD drive it took only 2 hours 40 minutes on my machine (Windows 7, 64bits)

Remarks

* Jom is nmake replacement for Qt compilation on multi-core CPU. Its parameter -j N allows to setup number of parallel processes for compilation. Number of physical CPU cores is a good choice for N.

** Do not forget to use /d switch if you want to change drive in command prompt, e.g: cd /d d:. Usual cd d: does not work anymore – a little “surprise” from Microsoft.

Contributions

* As Evon pointed in comments, Qt folder has huge size (approx. 7GB) after compilation. One can safely shrink its size by deleting temporary files created during the process. Once compiled Qt doesn’t depend on these intermediate files – and they can be erased without affecting Qt functionality. Run as last command in step 10:

..jomjom.exe clean

Note that PDB files will be deleted too (the files are rarely needed, only for debugging of Qt itself).

** Rob provided his compilation script based on nmake with multi-core support.

http://www.holoborodko.com/pavel/2011/02/01/how-to-compile-qt-4-7-with-visual-studio-2010/