BUILD_MAC.md

Build ghostwriter on Mac without installing XCode

1. Acknowledgements & License

This guide is derived from Qt without Xcode how-to by Peter Jonas (shoogle) / CC BY 4.0

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

2. Introduction. Why is this needed.

Older Qt versions (<5.9.1) try to use xcodebuild to find out where the utilities are installed. This fails with the following error message unless Xcode is installed:

Project ERROR: Could not resolve SDK Path for 'macosx' Error while parsing file <filename.pro>. Giving up.

You need to tell QMake to use xcrun instead.

3. Configure Qt 5.5 to use xcrun instead of xcodebuild

Open a Terminal and change directory to where brew installed target mkspecs files.

cd /usr/local/Cellar/[email protected]/5.5.1_1/mkspecs/features/mac

Now copy and paste these new commands into the same Terminal window to create backup copies of some files:

function backup_files() {
  for file in "$@"; do
    [[ -f "${file}.backup" ]] || cp "${file}" "${file}.backup"
  done
}
backup_files sdk.prf default_pre.prf default_post.prf

Press the Return key after the final command.

If that all went OK then run these commands to update the files:

url_base='https://raw.githubusercontent.com/qt/qtbase'
commit='fa7626713b3a943609453459190e16c49d61dfd3'
dir='mkspecs/features/mac'
curl -O "${url_base}/${commit}/${dir}/sdk.prf"
curl -O "${url_base}/${commit}/${dir}/default_pre.prf"
old_line='cache(QMAKE_XCODE_VERSION, stash)'
new_line='!isEmpty(QMAKE_XCODE_VERSION): cache(QMAKE_XCODE_VERSION, stash)'
sed "s|^${old_line}\$|${new_line}|" <default_post.prf.backup >default_post.prf

All done, please go back to the main README and continue following the building steps for MacOS.