Sailing Code

A blog with experiences of developing with SailfishOS

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Deploying a qml only app

19 Feb 2015

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App structure

A basic qt project structure is like this:

.
├── <app>.desktop
├── <app>.pro
├── <app>.png
├── qml
│   ├── <app>.qml
│   └── pages
│       └── *.qml
├── rpm
│   ├── <app>.spec
│   └── <app>.yaml
└── src
    └── *.cpp

Where <app> is the name of the application.

Default sailfish configuration forces the use of the qml and rpm folder. In addition, files <app>.desktop, <app>.pro and <app>.png are mandatory and cannot be moved.

pro File

Project or pro files contain all the information required by qmake to build your application. Generally, you use a series of declarations to specify the resources in the project.

A basic file will contain the followin directives:

The pro file allows more directives and configuration that exceed the need of packaging a qml only app.

Example:

TARGET = test
CONFIG += sailfishapp
SOURCES += src/test.cpp

# to disable building translations every time, comment out the
# following CONFIG line
CONFIG += sailfishapp_i18n
TRANSLATIONS += translations/test-de.ts

CONFIG prf in .pro file

qmake can be set up with extra configuration features that are specified in feature (.prf) files. These extra features often provide support for custom tools that are used during the build process. To add a feature to the build process, append the feature name (the stem of the feature filename) to the CONFIG variable.

Sailfish defines 3 posible .prf configurations:

The prf files are located in:

As we are developing a qml only app, we’ll choose sailfishapp_qml. The .prf file for this config is the following:

TEMPLATE = aux

qml.files = qml
qml.path = /usr/share/$${TARGET}

desktop.files = $${TARGET}.desktop
desktop.path = /usr/share/applications

icon.files = $${TARGET}.png
icon.path = /usr/share/icons/hicolor/86x86/apps

INSTALLS += qml desktop icon

OTHER_FILES += $$files(rpm/*)

This file defines:

.desktop file

As we are shipping no binary, some tweaks have to be made in order to execute the .qml file. A default .desktop file is like this:

[Desktop Entry]
Type=Application
X-Nemo-Application-Type=silica-qt5
Name=<Name of app>
Icon=<app>
Exec=<app>

The meaning of the entries are: * Type: Default value Application * X-Nemo-Application-Type: [optional] it defines the type of application. For Silica QT5, use silica-qt5, according to the faq this will make speedups for Silica Apps. Another posible value is no-invoker (i don’t know what it means). * Name: The name of the app, it doesn’t have to be unique, it’s the one that will be shown. * Icon: The name of the icon (without .png), it will be looked in /usr/share/icons/hicolor/86x86/apps. Generally, this will be <app>. * Exec: The executable file. * X-Nemo-Single-Instance: [optional] use no value if, multiple instances are allowed to run.

In order to run the .qml file, we’ll have to use sailfish-qml <app> in the Exec entry. sailfish-qml is a binary provided by SailfishOS that is used to run qml-only apps. It is very important that the main qml file is called <app> and is located under the qml folder, sailfish-qml run the file /usr/share/<app>/qml/<app>!.

.yaml file

This file is the one used to create the rpm, the structure of the file is decribed in the packaging post. Remember to include all files.

Example

The QtCreator base application has been modify in order to use it as an example of how to package a qml-only app. Download from here.

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