How to fix qt.qpa.plugin: Could not find the Qt platform plugin "windows" in "" error

[Gokalp]

@jsulm i installed it directly into the c folder

[SGaist]

So what happens now ?

[Gokalp]

@SGaist Will create an venv as soon as i understand how to do it and post the results for the pyqt5 debug

[Gokalp]

@SGaist I created a venv under c:/ directly and it worked perfectly but i'm still confused why it worked on a computer named Göktuğ bu not on this computer named GÖTUĞ ALKAN while both have utf-8 characters in them

[SGaist]

Might be the space in the path.

[YTKOHOC]

I know it is looks like not an answer but stupid mistake, but I step on that rakes ones again and according to some questions on "StackOverflow" not only me.
I placed .exe file alongside with all .dlls by windeployqt and with folder plugins containing my plugin. The problem appears when I load plugin in my app. Solution is pretty simple: I run windeployqt for my .exe but my plugin.dll requires own specific dlls and I didn't place them along. Putting all .exe's and plugin's dlls together helped me to get rid of that message.

[joeyun]

I also encountered the same problem today

I want to know exactly how to configure environment variables in the virtual environment of vscode？？

[nop144d]

An answer from ChatGPT just in case someone else finds it useful:

**It seems like the application cannot find the Qt platform plugin, specifically the "windows" plugin, from its current location.

Here's a potential solution for this issue:

1. First, make sure that the platforms directory from your Qt installation is included in your application's distribution. The platforms directory will be located under your QT installation directory like <QtDirectory>/plugins/platforms/. In this directory, you should find a file called qwindows.dll. This file is the Qt platform plugin for Windows. It is essential to running any Qt application on Windows.

2. Copy the entire platforms directory, and put it in the same directory as your application's executable.

Here's an example of what your directory structure should look like:

- YourApp.exe
- platforms/
    - qwindows.dll
- Other Qt DLLs like Qt5Core.dll, Qt5Gui.dll, etc.

Make sure to include any other required DLLs in the main directory (the same place where YourApp.exe is located). These will typically include the ones you said you've already copied: Qt5Core.dll, Qt5Gui.dll, and so on, depending on what modules your application uses.

When your application starts up, it will look for the platforms directory relative to its location. It will then load the platform plugin from there.

If you've done this and it still doesn't work, you might need to make sure the application is being run with its working directory set to the directory containing the executable and the platforms directory. It's possible that the application is being started with a different working directory, and so it's not finding the platforms directory even though it's there. You can typically set the working directory in whatever method you're using to start the application.**

[JonB]

@nop144d
Shame that ChatGPT does not mention the very first debugging step for such an error message: set environment variable set QT_DEBUG_PLUGINS=1 and then run your executable: should get diagnostic output to determine what the issue is.

[saga111a]

I had the same problem using virtual environment and pyqt5. This solved the problem:

set "QT_PLUGIN_PATH=%VIRTUAL_ENV%\Lib\site-packages\PyQt5\Qt5\plugins"

and I added this to the virtualenv activation script

....
@set "PATH=%VIRTUAL_ENV%\Scripts;%PATH%"

@set "QT_PLUGIN_PATH=%VIRTUAL_ENV%\Lib\site-packages\PyQt5\Qt5\plugins"  

@if defined _OLD_CODEPAGE (
....