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I am trying to deploy a Qt program on Mac according to this link. After going through with otool -L on my executable and all of the libraries that it depends on, which I copied into the application bundle, I get this error in QtCreator's application output when I try to run it.

This application failed to start because it could not find or load the Qt platform plugin "cocoa".

Reinstalling the application may fix this problem. The program has unexpectedly finished.

I've tried copying the qt platform plugins libqcocoa.dylib and changing the plugins directory in qt.conf, according to this, but it still fails.

Also worth pointing out, I first tried to use qt's macdeployqt tool, but it fails with this message, despite being the first time I run it on the executable:

ERROR: Could not find bundle binary for "MyProgram.app/Contents/MacOS/MyProgram" ERROR: "otool: can't open file: (No such file or directory)"

WARNING:

WARNING: Could not find any external Qt frameworks to deploy in "MyProgram.app/Contents/MacOS/MyProgram"

WARNING: Perhaps macdeployqt was already used on "MyProgram.app/Contents/MacOS/MyProgram" ?

WARNING: If so, you will need to rebuild "MyProgram.app/Contents/MacOS/MyProgram" before trying again. ERROR: Could not find bundle binary for "MyProgram.app/Contents/MacOS/MyProgram"

ERROR: file copy failed from "/Developer/Applications/Qt/plugins/platforms/libqcocoa.dylib"

ERROR: to "MyProgram.app/Contents/MacOS/MyProgram/Contents/PlugIns/platforms/libqcocoa.dylib"

ERROR: file copy failed from "/Developer/Applications/Qt/plugins/printsupport/libcocoaprintersupport.dylib"

ERROR: to "MyProgram.app/Contents/MacOS/GraphiteMiniEditor/Contents/PlugIns/printsupport/libcocoaprintersupport.dylib"

user23573
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Paul Musgrave
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  • When you've compiled your program and have an app bundle, if you right click on the bundle and select "Show Package Contents", you can look to see if the binary exists at "MyProgram.app/Contents/MacOS/MyProgram" Can you confirm it's there? – TheDarkKnight Nov 15 '13 at 09:55
  • Yes, it's there and that's the file that I ran all of the install_name_tool commands on. I ended up reverting to Qt4.8, and it's working now. – Paul Musgrave Nov 15 '13 at 20:58
  • Maybe you can try this modified version of macdeployqt: https://github.com/MaximAlien/macdeployqt I found it really not straight-forward to deploy Qt5 on Mac, this version of macdeployqt helped me on it. – dfranca May 11 '14 at 18:54
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    Is there any chance that you have both Qt 4 and Qt 5 on your OS? If you do please call macdeployqt directly from the Qt5 directory i.e: ~/Qt/5.5/clang64/bin/macdeployqt - as the parameter give path to app bundle (MyProgram.app) instead of app executable - it should work fine (at least for Qt 5.4 and 5.5 on OS X 10.10) – Kamil Klimek Nov 12 '15 at 14:31

3 Answers3

2

Re macdeployqt fails: it seems like, for the argument to macdeployqt you are passing the path to the executable instead of the path to the bundle. I.e. just pass .../MyProgram.app instead of .../MyProgram.app/Contents/MacOS/MyProgram.

(But I am also unable to get it find libqcocoa, in a sandboxed app. I may resort to linking that statically into my app.)

bootchk
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  • macdeployqt needs app bundle not app executable inside a bundle to work properly - I have deployed 2 different aps recently for Mac OS X (using Qt 5.4.2 and 5.5.1) without any problem with this tool. – Kamil Klimek Nov 12 '15 at 14:28
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To give Kamil Klimek's solution some more attention (It solved the problem for me):

I had the same problem when I installed QtCreator (Qt 5.x) with the offline installer, but apparently also had Qt (4.x) installed through Homebrew (probably pulled in as a dependency). Compiling the code with 5.x, and deploying it with the 4.x macdeployqt script doesn't work.

So, make sure that e.g.:

which macdeployqt

calls macdeployqt from the same Qt version / path used to compile the code.

Bart
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  • Calling "brew list" and "brew remove qt" + "brew remove qt5" seemed to help me (even though I explicitly pointed to the correct macdeployqt) – Marc Van Daele Oct 14 '16 at 07:06
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I had this error with OS X Lion, using Qt 5.4.2. When I installed the Xcode command line utilities, then the error went away and macdeployqt worked.

adam.baker
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