Compiling Qt projects in Qt/MsBuild format without Qt VS Tools installed

Question

I have many Qt projects in Visual Studio, using the new Qt/MsBuild format provided by the Qt VS Tools. When compiling in my development environment, where I have the Qt VS Tools installed, everything works flawlessly (compiling from IDE and from command line).

We have a computer dedicated to nightly builds, where only the compiler and msbuild are available (no IDE nor Qt VS Tools are installed).

When compiling the projects in such computer we get an error:

QtMsBuild: could not locate qt.targets, qt.props; project may not build correctly.

Followed by several lines such as

e:********\Preferences.h(4): fatal error C1083: Cannot open include file: 'ui_Preferences.h': No such file or directory

(Project contains Preferences.ui).

How can I solve such errors when Qt VS Tools are not installed?

Answer 1

One solution provided by the Tools' creators is to copy %LOCALAPPDATA%\QtMsBuild into each project directory. But we are talking about hundred of projects. Doing manually, and more on, pushing them as part of the project itself doesn't sound very elegant.

One option would be to add a pre-build step that copies it from a common place into each project (and adding a **/QtMsBuild line to each .gitignore file). Again, looks like too much work.

When looking at the .vcxproj file for the Qt project you find this fragment (the reason for the solution provided by creators):

<PropertyGroup Condition="'$(QtMsBuild)'=='' or !Exists('$(QtMsBuild)\qt.targets')">
  <QtMsBuild>$(MSBuildProjectDirectory)\QtMsBuild</QtMsBuild>
</PropertyGroup>

So, the simplest solution (without being able to install the tools), is to copy the %LOCALAPPDATA\QtMsBuild directory (from a system with the Tools installed) into the night computer (in any common place, but I decided to keep the location used by the tools) and then setting an environment variable:

set QtMsBuild=%LOCALAPPDATA%\QtMsBuild

PS: do not add double quotes to the variable (at least I had problems with them, so VS couldn't find the files).

Update 9-14-2020

I'm not sure on which version it started, but Qt projects created with (at least) the v2.5.2 Qt VS Tools fails to compile indicating that the Qt version has not been set. To solve so, you can

1. Copy the Registry entries from a computer with tools installed, located at HKCU\SOFTWARE\Digia\Versions.
2. If you will rely on a single Qt version (but that may be update globally for all projects), you can skip the Registry and just set the Qt version of all projects to $(DefaultQtVersion) (the same used in past project formats) and define an environment variable pointing to the directory of the version: set DefaultQtVersion=c:\Qt\Qt_5_15_0\Win32, for example.

Answer 2

I had problems in my case setting up $Env:QtToolsPath="$Env:QT_PATH\bin" fixed the problem. (It was not finding qmake for some checks). This, I think, is required when using QtMsBuild v3.3

Not sure if this info is 100% correct but may help someone.

For me to use MsBuild with Qt using QtMsBuild (not installing Visual Studio and/or VS plugins), I need to set up:

Example (PowerShell):

- $Env:PATH="$Env:MSBUILD_PATH;$Env:PATH"
- $Env:QT_PATH="D:\BuildTools\Qt\5.15.1\msvc2019_64"
- $Env:QtMsBuild="D:\BuildTools\Qt\QtMsBuild303" #303 Against visual studio project version
- $Env:QtToolsPath="$Env:QT_PATH\bin" #Support QtMSBuild , At desktop is done by the plug in
- $Env:PATH="$Env:QtMsBuild;$Env:PATH"
- $Env:PATH="$Env:QT_PATH\bin;$Env:PATH"

Answer 3

I hit this and got it working.

I followed @cbuchart 's advice; but needed to do a little more/different.

So here is what I did. I copied %LOCALAPPDATA%\QtMsBuild to my repo. I then edited my .vcxproj with a text editor. I adjusted the line that looks like:

<QtMsBuild Condition="'$(QtMsBuild)'=='' OR !Exists('$(QtMsBuild)\qt.targets')">$(MSBuildProjectDirectory)\QtMsBuild</QtMsBuild>

To be:

<QtMsBuild Condition="'$(QtMsBuild)'=='' OR !Exists('$(QtMsBuild)\qt.targets')">$(MSBuildProjectDirectory)\..\QtMsBuild</QtMsBuild>

Depending on the relative location of where your project(s) are to the copied QtMsBuild directory you might want to adjust this. In my case the .vcxproj was in a directory one level from the directory that contains the QtMsBuild directory I copied.

Next in the QtMsBuild/Qt.props file I added the following:

<PropertyGroup>
   <DefaultQtVersion>$(MSBuildThisFileDirectory)\..\Qt5.15.0\msvc2019_64</DefaultQtVersion>
   <QtToolsPath>$(DefaultQtVersion)\bin</QtToolsPath>
</PropertyGroup>

That was added right after the opening Project tag in that file.

This was as @cbuchart mentioned something might have changed. I didn't do the Registry idea; but added those lines instead. I think it is possible to add them to a different file that gets imported before Qt.props if desired.

Now as for what this "Qt5.15.0\msvc2019_64" is; you'll need the tools, includes, libraries from a computer with Qt installed in order to build (also DLLs if your build needs to run the executable (i.e. tests)). This might be a lot of files so you can reduce it some if you know what you are doing. It might make sense to have these be put into it's own submodule or something.

After that it should uic/moc files and ultimately build (and run).