How to build Qt 5.5 QtWebEngine on Windows & MSVC 2015

Question

Has anyone successfully built Qt's WebEngine / QtWebEngine / QWebEngine on Windows using Microsoft Visual Studio C++ 2015?

What prerequisites are necessary?

I managed to build Qt itself, but QtWebEngine was skipped, so I tried nmake module-qtwebengine which fails for several reasons.

Answer 1

This is only a partial answer as of now intended to give anyone interested some pointers in the right direction.

First, Qt 5.5.0 does not support Microsoft Visual C++ 2015 at all.

That said, we can patch qtwebengine\tools\qmake\mkspecs\features\functions.prf and change the few occurrences of win32-msvc2013 to win32-msvc2015 to ignore the error that we are not using MSVC 2013.

You need Python 2.x in your path for building. Python 3 will not work.

Open a Visual Studio 2015 Command Prompt and change to your Qt source directory root.

To utilize multiple cores on your machine, do set CL=/MP.

Run configure -release -confirm-license -nomake examples -opensource. Note that -debug may fail.

Run nmake module-qtwebengine.

Now, when we try to build it, it will probably fail because it cannot find a ninja -- yet another build tool to complicate things, and included in the Qt source. You can either try to build it, or you get a binary for Windows from GitHub and save ninja.exe as qtwebengine\src\3rdparty\ninja\ninja.exe.

Looks like I am not the only one having problems... and one reason seems to be Chromium itself, and that looks like unfinished work.

does anybody now if and when QtWebEngine will build with VS1025?

When Chromium starts supporting building with VS2015. So far it doesn't looks like it will be in 5.6

http://lists.qt-project.org/pipermail/development/2015-July/022723.html

HERE BE DRAGONS

to be continued...