Deploying on MacOS with QtIFW

J.Hilk

Hello everyone.

I find myself in the situation that I want to deploy my code for Win, Linux and Mac. I would like to use the QtInstallerframework for this, since it became public use and QT itself uses it to deploy itself. But i'm a bit of a loss here.

What is working properly:

I think I got the App-Bundle set up correctly
the Installer.app seems to create all neccessary files correctly too
I managed to create all shortcuts with Windows as OS

The problem comes with the desktop short cut and /or finder/launchpad entry for macOS.

The Docu shows only how to do it for Windows and online I've found mostly windows references as well as some linux tips- mostly from this forum :-)

If I understand this correctly I'll have to modify only the installerscript for this
Here is what I have:

function Component()
{
     if (systemInfo.productType === "windows") { 
        var programFiles = installer.environmentVariable("ProgramFiles");
        if (programFiles != "")
             installer.setValue("TargetDir", programFiles + "/companyName/AppName");
    }
    if (systemInfo.productType === "mac") {
       var programFiles = installer.environmentVariable("TargetDir");
        if (programFiles != "")
             installer.setValue("TargetDir", programFiles + "/companyName/AppName");
    }

}

Component.prototype.isDefault = function()
{
    // select the component by default
    return true;
}

Component.prototype.createOperations = function()
{
    try {
        // call the base create operations function
        component.createOperations();
    } catch (e) {
        console.log(e);
    }
	
    if (systemInfo.productType === "windows") { 
       component.addOperation("CreateShortcut", "@TargetDir@/AppName.exe", "@StartMenuDir@/AppName.lnk", "workingDirectory=@TargetDir@");
	component.addOperation("CreateShortcut", "@TargetDir@/AppName.exe", "@HomeDir@/Desktop/uConfig.lnk");
    }
    if (systemInfo.productType === "mac") {
        component.addOperation("CreateShortcut", "@TargetDir@/companyName/AppName/AppName.app", "@HomeDir@/Desktop/AppName");
    }
}

Obviously this does not result in a Dekstop - Link/Alias and I wouldn't know how to add an entry to the launchpad too. Hopefully someone can help me out here.

Is that even possible with QtIFW? Because I had to create a desktop shortcut under mac manually after installing QtCreator.

J.Hilk

So, I managed to answer my own question. Took me longer than I'll like to admit, but I'll share my workaround here, in case someone else has this problem:

If you use apples osascript one can use a shell command to create a desktop alias.

With that in mind I created a bash skript makeAlias.sh:

#!/bin/bash

osascript <<END_SCRIPT
tell application "Finder" to make alias file to file (posix file "$1") at desktop
END_SCRIPT

That gets added to the app-bundle with the following code in the *.pro-file

macx{
   App_Data.files = /path/to/script/makeAlias.sh
   App_Data.path= Contents/MacOS/data
   QMAKE_Bundle_Data += App_Data
}

the installscript.qs of the InstallerFramework, gets the following addition to execute the script:

var argList = ["@TargetDir@/myApp.app/Contents/MacOS/data/makeAlias.sh", "@TargetDir@/myApp.app"];
installer.execute("sh",argList);

and done.
In the end, quite easy ....