Extending Qt Creator Manual | Getting and Building Qt Creator

Extending Qt Creator Manual 4.4.0

# Getting and Building Qt Creator

      TODO: This should be extended.
      * Windows specific hassle, see README in \QC sources

There are several reasons why you might want to do your own build of Qt Creator, like using the most current development version and being able to tweak Qt Creator at one or the other place. It is also necessary if you want to create your own Qt Creator plugin.

## Getting Qt

Prebuilt Qt Creator packages usually use the latest stable release of Qt. You can see the exact minimum requirement at the top of Qt Creator's `qtcreator.pro`. (You can find the current version in our source repository here: https://code.qt.io/cgit/qt-creator/qt-creator.git/tree/qtcreator.pro#n4.)

You can get prebuilt Qt packages from Qt Downloads. If you want to use Qt as provided by your Linux distribution, you need to make sure that all Qt development packages and private header packages are also installed.

## Getting and Building Qt Creator

You can get the Qt Creator sources for a specific version either by using one of the released source bundles, or from the Git repository https://code.qt.io/cgit/qt-creator/qt-creator.git. If you intend to contribute to Qt Creator itself, you should use the repository from our Gerrit review tool as described in: Setting up Gerrit.

We strongly encourage you to do out-of-source builds of Qt Creator (also called shadow-builds).

After you put the Qt Creator sources somewhere (lets call the path `<QtCreatorSources>`) you build it on Linux and Mac with

      cd <QtCreatorSources>/..
      mkdir qtcreator-build
      cd qtcreator-build
      <QtInstall>/bin/qmake -r <QtCreatorSources>
      make

or the corresponding commands on Windows systems.