Qt for Python/GettingStarted/Windows

Official documentation

Refer to the official documentation to get started on Windows.

Build considerations

Building PySide2 on Windows is a bit special in the sense that some rules have to be followed:

• The MSVC version used to build Python, Qt and PySide2 must be the same. The only exception are MSVC2015 & MSVC2017 as those compilers produce compatible binaries.
  • In practice this means that if you use the official Python 3.x package from [1] which is built with MSVC 2015, you need to use a Qt package built with MSVC 2015 (or MSVC2017 due to the aforementioned compatibility).
  • Using the official Python 2.x package will not be feasible, due to it being built with MSVC 2008, and there being no official prebuilt Qt package for the same MSVC version.
• The build configuration (debug or release) has to be the same for Python, Qt and PySide2.
• The above considerations are necessary to ensure that only a single MSVC runtime library is loaded, otherwise this can cause memory corruption, crashes or undefined behavior.

Development

Development happens in the 5.12 and dev branches of the pyside-setup repository. The top level repository has the following submodules:

• sources/pyside2-tools: uic, rcc tools
• sources/pyside2-examples (5.6 only, examples are no longer a submodule in 5.9+)

Contributions follow the standard process. It is helpful to have debug binaries and/or symbols for Python available. On Windows, this is done by choosing Customized Installation when installing Python and ticking the respective check boxes. It is also recommended to use a Virtual Environment for testing to be able to always start from a clean base and avoid issues with write permissions in installations. On Windows an installation step may be required:

python -m pip install virtualenv                                                       
python -m virtualenv testenv                                                                                                                                           

The Virtual Environment is activated by·

CALL testenv\Scripts\activate.bat                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                              

Before building the first time, the module Sphinx should be installed into the virtual environment:·

pip install sphinx

Other useful modules are

pip install numpy PyOpenGL