As a programmer, you love Qt! Qt is a powerful C++ based SDK to develop cross-platform software. You can download the SDK from its official website and install the huge package to local folder, however, once installed, you can not move the SDK to other location.

After hours of Qt building from source code, you find you have to move the build directory to other partition or folder. Before starting the long compiling process, sometimes you do not even know where the built package will be installed later.

As a very good habit, you backup your valuable source code every week; after releasing a product or reaching an important milestone, you also want to backup your current development environment so that you can re-create the same development environment quickly. You archive the Qt/SDK and burn it to a DVD. One year later, you have to go back to the project to fix some issues, unfortunately you have forget where you should unzip the old SDK backup. You must unzip the backup to exactly the same folder as it was first installed because Qt/SDK is not portable!

From a friend or internal LAN server you get a copy of custom build of Qt SDK, however, you do not know the install folder the SDK was built for, or you simply cannot clone the same directory layout in your local development machine, you have to put the SDK somewhere different from where it was built for.

So ask yourself: How can I deploy the Qt SDK to any target folder? Do I have to uninstall and reinstall the official SDK? Do I have to take another night building the SDK from source code again only to change the install folder? What if I need to install my SDK to different machines? Do I have to keep exactly the same directory layout for all machines?

These questions sound very easy to resolve, and to me rebuilding Qt again and again is simply a crazy and stupid idea. Unfornately, after googling everywhere and wasted many hours myself, there seems no easy solution. Many other Qt developers have had the same problems and there is no easy solution.

That is why QtMove is created: makes the Qt/SDK completely portable!

For many reasons, you want to build the SDK from source code. For example:

• The official SDK is built in VC++ 2008 and your project is using VC++2010, the C++ libs cannot be used across different C++ versions;
• you need a special feature that the official SDK does not enable it, or you want to turn off many features to make the final binaries much smaller.
• You have to support platform that standard SDK binary does not exist. For instance, the standard 4.8.1 Windows SDK installation package does not have 64bit version; the 4.8.1 Mac SDK does not support Leopard and remove the support for PowerPC, but you have to support Leopard for your customers.

Building Qt from source code takes very long time (several hours) even with modern CPU, and there are lots of configuration parameters available to tweak, or, in the worst case, you have to apply some patches to Qt source code to complete the whole process.

On this website, you will find some custom SDK builds on Windows, Mac and Linux, they are provided here to save your valuabe time in case you have to rebuild them again and again. It is recommended that you download and use the official build, all Qt/SDK copyright belongs to Nokia.

If you find the website is useful, please donate to keep the website alive, thanks! ;-)

Windows	There are 3 steps to relocate the SDK, assume your new SDK root folder is $QT_HOME: Specify the full path to the QMake.exe (or qmake on Mac or Linux) in target SDK folder. QMake is in the $QT_HOME\bin\ folder, you can browse to it or simply drag QMake.exe from Windows Explorer and drop it on the QtMove UI; Press "Synchronize with QMake Path" button so QtMake will deduce the QT_HOME from path of QMake.exe and populate the QT macro list with the *correct" values; Press "Save" button to save the macro modifications to QMake.exe, all done! You can press "Read" button to read the current settings from QMake.exe, you can also edit each QT macros in the list box manually, however, the last two macros (QT_INSTALL_CONFIGURATION, QMAKE_MKSPECS) is read only and their values are deduced from other macros. If you think this tiny utility does save you boring hours and error-prone process of rebuiling QT, feel free to press "Donate" button to show thanks to the author ;)
MacOS X (Leopard, SnowLeopard, Lion)	On Mac, download qtmove.py and put it anywhere, then double click its icon in Finder to launch the GUI.
Linux	On Linux, you need to install python and python-tk packages to run the utility. If you are running Ubuntu, the default Ubuntu installation has python pre-installed, you can install python-tk package as following: sudo apt-get install python-tk Run the QtMove script in a terminal box: python qtmove.py

QtMove and SDK Download

Product	Windows	MacOS	Linux
QtMove	QtMove.exe (907KB) The QtMove.exe is packed with special EXE compressing technology to keep it small and portable, some anti-virus products might detect it as virus or malware, it is just a silly false positive!	qtmove.py(8KB)
QtSDK	The Qt 4.8.1 SDK is built with all VC runtime and SSL library statically linked, so they are self-contained and you do not need to ship MSVC runtime dlls and OpenSSL dlls with your product. Nokia's standard SDK needs MSVCP100.dll, MSVCR100.dll and OpenSSL dlls (libeay32.dll and ssleay32.dll) at runtime! Qt 4.8.1, 32bit, VC2010 (52.1 MB) and its PDB files(24.2MB) Qt 4.8.1, 64bit, VC2010 (62.1 MB) and its PDB files(24.2MB)	The following Qt 4.8.1 SDK/Mac is built with XCode 3.1.4 on Mac OS X v10.5 (Leopard); it is a complete universal build (i386/x86_64/ppc/ppc64). Nokia's Standard SDK does not support Leopard and PowerPC! Qt 4.8.1 for Leopard, dylib version(115 MB) Qt 4.8.1 for Leopard, framework version(108 MB)