How to deploy Qt/QML application without SDK?

answered 2014-10-23 21:34:15 +0300

Camil B
576 ●15 ●21 ●30

updated 2014-10-23 21:41:18 +0300

Warning: by following this tutorial you will drill a hole in the root filesystem, which is a security issue. Just so you know.

Here's how I do the programming (just learning QML at the moment, so I needed a procedure for very quick prototyping without the SDK). This is an example for a hypothetical application, called Oranges. We will put its pure-QML code in a nicely accessible place, and then call it in the command-line. So here it is:

Create folder /home/nemo/Devel. This folder will hold all your pure-QML projects. Inside /home/nemo/Devel, create a folder Oranges, to hold your project. Then create the following folders:

/home/nemo/Devel/Oranges/qml
/home/nemo/Devel/Oranges/qml/pages
/home/nemo/Devel/Oranges/qml/cover

Inside /home/nemo/Devel/Oranges/qml, put the file Oranges.qml. This is the main file of your application, and must have the same name as your application - it's a rule in SailfishOS (maybe MeeGo too?). Inside Oranges.qml, copy this:

import QtQuick 2.0
import Sailfish.Silica 1.0
import "pages"

ApplicationWindow
{
  initialPage: Component { MyFirstPage { } }
  cover: Qt.resolvedUrl("cover/CoverPage.qml")
}

Of course, this is the standard ApplicationWindow definition, like in any SailfishOS app. It's all you need. Don't forget to also create the QML files /home/nemo/Devel/Oranges/qml/pages/MyFirstPage.qml, and /home/nemo/Devel/Oranges/qml/cover/CoverPage.qml, and put nice things in them to impress your users.

Now the best parts:

1. Open the terminal, and go root.
2. ln -s /home/nemo/Devel/Oranges /usr/share/Oranges (you will do this for every project you put into your Devel folder. This is a security hole, since any app can maliciously overwrite your files in /home/nemo/Devel/Oranges with bad QML code, and that code will be executed by SailfishOS without discrimination)
3. Ctrl-D to exit root.
4. Now the fruity magic: sailfish-qml Oranges and your app starts! Or crashes when it has bugs, and QML will log everything to the terminal, of course.

What you achieved is this: now you have the project easily editable in your home and you can run it in the proper sailfishy way. sailfish-qml will run your QML files as if they were a real app, respecting all conventions and giving you all the privileges that a full C++ SailfishOS app would have. Well, at least all that's available through the QML API. Moreover, your source is on your phone all the time, so you can edit it easily. If you have Linux + KDE, you can transparently access the phone's filesystem through SFTP (did you know that it supports SFTP, and it's enabled by default? it's awesome! :D) like it would be mounted as a partition, thanks to KDE's awesome KIO framework. So you edit the files directly on the phone, live, with your favourite editor.

If someone could give some instructions about how to create a custom Launcher icon for Oranges, that would be awesome.

Keep the dry side up and the wet side down!

answered 2014-10-23 22:08:30 +0300

MartinK
18500 ●154 ●178 ●174

updated 2014-10-23 22:09:50 +0300

Why no just run the application with qmlscene ? Unlike the very limited sailfish-qml launcher it can launch a QML applications from any path:

qmlscene /home/nemo/whatewer/app.qml

I'm not sure if qmlscene is included by default, but rpm -qf /usr/bin/qmlscene tells me it is provided by the qtchooser package.

answered 2015-04-07 04:19:02 +0300

backpackjoe
71 ●1 ●4 ●7

I have written a small Makefile and a template that packages/deploys a qml/pyOtherSide app:

https://github.com/dasimmet/Sailfish-Python

It uses fpm to build a rpm package in /tmp/fpm-jolla and sends it to your jolla/emulator via ssh, where it is installed with pkcon. I still have to look into what it takes to make them harbour-conform, but for development purposes, it works quite nicely.