CMake-Based Qt Creator Snapshots

About a year ago we started porting the build system that we use for building Qt Creator itself from qmake to CMake. Nowadays we are in the state that many Qt Creator developers use CMake for building Qt Creator for their daily work, but the official packages are still based on the qmake build.

CMake-Based Snapshots

We proudly present you Qt Creator snapshots that were built with CMake:

https://download.qt.io/snapshots/qtcreator_cmake/

The goal of these snapshots is that they will replace the official, qmake-based packages at some point. So we want to encourage you to download, install and test them, so we can fix any breakages compared to the packages built with qmake. Please use our bugtracker for reporting issues as usual, using the component "Building Qt Creator", and the label "cmake_build".

Known Issues

Before creating a new bug report, please check our list of known issues in JIRA:

https://bugreports.qt.io/issues/?filter=22320

The biggest difference between the CMake-based packages and the official, qmake-based builds is that they do not ship Qbs. Qbs currently cannot be built with CMake. QTCREATORBUG-23905 discusses the options that we have. If you install Qbs through other means you should still be able to work with Qbs projects in Qt Creator, of course. Just point it to your Qbs executable in Options > Qbs.

Building Qt Creator with CMake

If you are building Qt Creator yourself, you should also check out switching to the CMake build. Best is if you use the "4.13" or "master" branches. Qt Creator requires at least CMake 3.10 and Qt 5.14, and LLVM 10 for the Clang code model. You point the CMAKE_PREFIX_PATH to your Qt installation and LLVM, and specify a CMAKE_BUILD_TYPE. I recommend using Ninja over other build tools, but make, nmake or JOM work, too. For example on Linux or macOS:

cd qtcreator-src
mkdir build
cd build
cmake -D"CMAKE_PREFIX_PATH=/path/to/qt;/path/to/llvm" -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Debug -G Ninja ..
cmake --build .

If you want to mimick what the packaging builds do, you can also use the build script at "scripts/build.py". That provides nice command line arguments for various build options, but might not be as suitable if you intend to develop Qt Creator itself.