- Qt 5.3
- Qt for Windows - Requirements
- Qt 5.3.2 Reference Documentation

# Qt for Windows - Requirements

This page describes the required libraries and environment for Qt for Windows.

## Libraries

These libraries are required when running Qt 5 applications in Windows:

- ICU: Qt 5 can make use of the ICU library for enhanced UNICODE and Globalization support (see QTextCodec, QCollator::setNumericMode()).

  At compile time, the include and lib folders of the ICU installation must be appended to the `INCLUDE` and `LIB` environment variables. At run-time, the ICU DLLs need to be found by copying the DLLs to the application folder or by adding the bin folder of the ICU installation to the `PATH` environment variable.

- ANGLE: This library converts OpenGL ES 2.0 API calls to DirectX 9, removing the need to install graphics drivers on the target machines. Building the library requires the installation of the Direct X SDK. More information is available at http://code.google.com/p/angleproject/wiki/DevSetup

  Note: When building for 64-bit environments, de-activate the `WarnAsError` option in every project file, otherwise, integer conversion warnings will break the build.

Support for Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) communication is provided by the OpenSSL Toolkit, which must be obtained separately. See Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) Classes for instructions on building Qt with SSL support.

### Graphics Drivers

For Qt Quick 2 to work, a graphics driver that provides OpenGL 2.1 or higher is required. The default driver from Windows is OpenGL 1.1. Qt includes a version of the ANGLE project which is included from the Windows Qt installers. ANGLE implements the OpenGL ES 2.0 API on top of DirectX 9. ANGLE requires that the DirectX SDK is installed when building Qt.

To use a custom version of ANGLE, set the `ANGLE_DIR` environment variable to point to the ANGLE source tree before building Qt.

If you installed additional OpenGL drivers from your hardware vendor, then you may want to consider using this version of OpenGL instead of ANGLE. To use OpenGL, pass the command line options `-opengl desktop` to the configure script.

    configure -opengl desktop

To use an OpenGL ES 2.0 emulator instead of ANGLE, use the configure options: `-opengl es2 -no-angle`.

    configure -opengl es2 -no-angle

## Building from Source

These tools are not needed to run Qt 5 applications, but they are required for building Qt 5 from source.

- ActivePerl - Install a recent version of ActivePerl (download page) and add the installation location to your `PATH`.
- Python - Install Python from the here and add the installation location to your PATH in order to be able to build Qt WebKit.
- Install Ruby from here and add the installation location to your PATH in order to be able to build Qt WebKit.

Note: Please make sure that the `perl` executable from ActivePerl is found in the path before the perl executable provided by msysgit, since the latter is outdated.

Qt WebKit and ANGLE depend on these extra tools from the GnuWin32 Project which are provided for your convenience in the gnuwin32/bin folder:

- Bison
- GPerf
- Flex

The gnuwin32/bin folder should be added to the `PATH` variable.

For instructions for building the Qt 5 source,read the Qt for Windows - Building from Source page.

## SDKs and Compilers

A Windows SDK is required to develop Qt applications on Windows.

- Windows SDK 8 (with Visual Studio 2012 Express). As of Windows 8, the SDK no longer ships with a complete command-line build environment. You must install a compiler and build environment separately. If you require a complete development environment that includes compilers and a build environment, you can download Visual Studio 2012 Express, which includes the appropriate components of the Windows SDK. (Download page)
- Windows SDK 7.1. Note that, as of 16.3.2012, if you use this SDK with Visual Studio 2010, installing the SDK requires installing the following packages in this order (see readme.html provided with the service pack):
  1. Install Visual Studio 2010
  2. Install Windows SDK 7.1
  3. Install Visual Studio 2010 SP1
  4. Install Visual C++ 2010 SP1 Compiler Update for the Windows SDK 7.1
- Windows SDK 7.
- A MinGW toolchain with g++ version 4.7 or higher. Qt 5 is tested regularly with a 32 bit gcc 4.8.0 toolchain from the MinGW-builds project.

For the most up to date information about the Qt WebKit dependencies, please refer to the Qt WebKit Wiki for Windows.