nixpkgs/doc/languages-frameworks/qt.section.md

Qt

Writing Nix expressions for Qt libraries and applications is largely similar to that for other C++ software. This section assumes some knowledge of the latter.

The major caveat with Qt applications is that Qt uses a plugin system to load additional modules at runtime. In Nixpkgs, we wrap Qt applications to inject environment variables telling Qt where to discover the required plugins and QML modules.

This effectively makes the runtime dependencies pure and explicit at build-time, at the cost of introducing an extra indirection.

Nix expression for a Qt package (default.nix)

{ stdenv, qt6 }:

stdenv.mkDerivation {
  pname = "myapp";
  version = "1.0";

  buildInputs = [ qt6.qtbase ];
  nativeBuildInputs = [ qt6.wrapQtAppsHook ];
}

The same goes for Qt 5 where libraries and tools are under libsForQt5.

Any Qt package should include wrapQtAppsHook in nativeBuildInputs, or explicitly set dontWrapQtApps to bypass generating the wrappers.

Packages supporting multiple Qt versions

If your package is a library that can be built with multiple Qt versions, you may want to take Qt modules as separate arguments (qtbase, qtdeclarative etc.), and invoke the package from pkgs/top-level/qt5-packages.nix or pkgs/top-level/qt6-packages.nix using the respective callPackage functions.

Applications should generally be built with upstream's preferred Qt version.

Locating additional runtime dependencies

Add entries to qtWrapperArgs to modify the wrappers created by wrapQtAppsHook:

{ stdenv, qt6 }:

stdenv.mkDerivation {
  # ...
  nativeBuildInputs = [ qt6.wrapQtAppsHook ];
  qtWrapperArgs = [ "--prefix PATH : /path/to/bin" ];
}

The entries are passed as arguments to wrapProgram.

If you need more control over the wrapping process, set dontWrapQtApps to disable automatic wrapper generation, and then create wrappers manually in fixupPhase, using wrapQtApp, which itself is a small wrapper over wrapProgram:

The makeWrapper arguments required for Qt are also exposed in the environment as $qtWrapperArgs.

{
  stdenv,
  lib,
  wrapQtAppsHook,
}:

stdenv.mkDerivation {
  # ...
  nativeBuildInputs = [ wrapQtAppsHook ];
  dontWrapQtApps = true;
  preFixup = ''
    wrapQtApp "$out/bin/myapp" --prefix PATH : /path/to/bin
  '';
}

::: {.note} wrapQtAppsHook ignores files that are non-ELF executables. This means that scripts won't be automatically wrapped so you'll need to manually wrap them as previously mentioned. An example of when you'd always need to do this is with Python applications that use PyQt. :::