How to prevent Qt from compiling code examples

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NOTE: This guide is for Qt 4. See Building_Qt_5_from_Git for instructions for Qt 5.

Compile Qt Faster by Skipping Examples

Compiling Qt is fairly straight-forward, but quite a lengthy process.

To make it much quicker, an easy way is to prevent examples from being compiled.

One way of doing it is:

• extract source sdk (or git clone it)
• start configure with option "dont-process" (works only on windows, doesn't seem to exist on Linux configure)

configure -openssl -qt-libjpeg -qt-gif -qt-zlib -webkit -phonon -no-plugin-manifests -plugin-sql-sqlite -opensource -debug-and-release -confirm-license -dont-process

• then launch explicitely newly created qmake to build only libs and tools

QTDIR%/qmake/qmake -r QT_BUILD_PARTS="libs tools"

• Compile generated makefile

nmake

Compilation time is improved by around 80 (approximately 100 minutes instead of 8 hours) and you end up with a perfectly usable Qt, in debug and release.

On Linux configure and build can be accelerated by using all available cores.

export MAKEFLAGS=-j4
configure -AllTheOptionsYouNeed
make -j4

Note that compilation place is hardcoded inside qmake and used to find QMAKESPECs. You can however change it later using qmake -query lists all available variable (mostly paths) qmake -set overrides previously hardcoded value