Building QET from source

This section is for users and contributors wanting to build and/or improve QElectroTech (QET).

This guide assumes that you have forked the source repo and that your system has the Git VCS (Version Control System) configured to point to that fork. For installation instructions, please refer to the Installing Git instructions.

Warning

Make sure to add Git to your PATH during the Windows installation.

If you need help to setup Git or you are unsure about something regarding pushing code to the repo, please have a look at the Contributing guidelines.

Prerequisites

  • Get the sources and initialize the submodules by running this command

git clone --recursive https://github.com/qelectrotech/qelectrotech-source-mirror.git

Linux

Native

  • For a Debian-like machine (Ubuntu, Linux Mint, etc), install the required packages. These include QT 5 and KDE 5.15.X Dev headers and other utilities like SQLite DB code utilities.

sudo apt install libqt5svg5-dev qt5-qmake qtbase5-dev libkf5widgetsaddons-dev libkf5coreaddons-dev libsqlite3-dev pkgconf

Containerized

If you are worried about risks of dependency breakage, you can use a tool like Distrobox to easily setup a contained environment. After creating the box with your choice OS, follow the package install guidelines in the “Native” part of the build docs.

Example of Debian box creation. Replace <name> with the one you want to give to it.

distrobox-create -i debian:latest -n <name>

Windows

Note

Due to the fact that Windows uses its own C compiler (MSVC) and doesn’t ship with a GCC version by default, the Prerequisites Step is a little bit more involved than on Linux.

Install QT

  1. Download the Qt Online Installer.

  2. During installation:

    • Select Custom Installation.

    • See Qt 5 by checking ‘Archive’ and clicking ‘Filter’ button

    • Enable Qt 5.15.2 → MinGW 8.1.0 64-bit under the Archive section.

    • Enable Build Tools → MinGW 8.1.0 64-bit.

  3. After installation:

    • Qt will be installed at: C:\Qt\5.15.2\mingw81_64.

    • MinGW will be available at: C:\Qt\Tools\mingw810_64\bin.

After completing the installation, set the two PATH Variables for the KDE Step.

Set the QTPATH Variable

Set the QTPATH environment variable to point to your Qt installation directory. For example:

SET QTPATH=C:\Qt\5.15.2\mingw81_64
Add MinGW to PATH

  1. Add the following directory to your PATH environment variable: C:\Qt\Tools\mingw810_64\bin

  2. Verify installation:

mingw32-make --version

Install CMake

  1. Download and install CMake.

  2. Add CMake to your system PATH during installation.

  3. Verify the installation:

cmake --version

Download and Compile KDE Components

Compilation instructions

After setting your developer environment, you will now learn how to compile the QET source code from the IDE or the CLI.

IDE Setup and Compilation

Windows

To install the QT Creator IDE on Windows, you can choose one of the two following options:

  • Use the Qt Online Installer previously mentioned, in which case you can select the QT Creator IDE as a component to install during the Setup.

Linux

  1. After installing the dependencies, install the QT Creator IDE. Depending on your OS type, you have two options:

  • If you are using a bleeding edge distro like Fedora, Arch or Ubuntu Non LTS , chances are that their builds are up to date. Install it by running the apt command:

sudo apt install qt-creator

  • If you are using a distro with a slower release cycle like Debian, you’ll need to do two things:

    1. First setup Flatpak

    2. Then use Flatpak to install the QT Creator IDE

flatpak install flathub io.qt.QtCreator

After installation, click on “File”>”Open File or Project” or use the shortcut ctrl+O to open your OS file dialog. Click the .pro file to open the project and click “Build”>”Run” to run the project.

CLI Compilation

Windows

Linux

If you do not want to use the QT Creator IDE or you are using another IDE (VSCode, Sublime Text, etc…), you can compile the codebase using these commands:

cd qelectrotech-source-mirror.git
mkdir build && cd build
qmake  ../qelectrotech.pro
make -j$(nproc)

This will instruct qmake to prepare the required files in the build directory and launch compilation with the make command.