How To Set Default App For Developer Files Mac

How To Set Default App For Developer Files Mac Catalina
How To Set Default App For Developer Files Mac Osx
How To Set Default App For Developer Files Mac 10

Apr 18, 2016 This video shows you how to open certain files into certain applications automatically. For example, you can tell every single Microsoft Word document on your Mac to open in TextEdit or Open. By default macOS allows you to open apps from the official App Store only. If you have this still set as your default you will be seeing the warning when you try to open an app for the first time.

From the pop-up menu, choose an application that Mac OS X believes will open this document type. (Optional) If you click the Change All button at the bottom of the Open With pane, you make Pixelmator the new default application for all.tif files that would otherwise be opened in Preview.
Assign a default program to open the file type from Settings page by following the steps below: Press Windows logo key on the keyboard, type Default programs and select the top most search result. Scroll the page down and click on Choose default apps by file type from the window. Locate the file format from the window, click on the file.
The process to switch default Apps is super-fast and easy to do, and easy to change again later any time you want. How To Set Default Search Engine In Chrome For the sake of this guide we’re going to switch.M3U files (commonly used as playlists) from opening in iTunes to the media player VLC.
Use a “Developer ID” application, kernel extension, system extension, or installer certificate for your code-signing signature. (Don't use a Mac Distribution, ad hoc, Apple Developer, or local development certificate.) Verify the certificate type before submitting, as described in Use a Valid Developer ID Certificate.
Apple helps you keep your Mac secure with software updates. The best way to keep your Mac secure is to run the latest software. When new updates are available, macOS sends you a notification — or you can opt in to have updates installed automatically when your Mac is not in use. MacOS checks for new updates every day, so it’s easy to always have the latest and safest version.

Before you can open a file, you first have to locate it in the file system. The system frameworks provide many routines for obtaining references to many well-known directories, such as the Library directory and its contents. You can also specify locations manually by building a URL or string-based path from known directory names.

When you know the location of a file, you can then start planning the best way to access it. Depending on the type of file, you may have several options. For known file types, you typically use built-in system routines to read or write the file contents and give you an object that you can use. For custom file types, you may need to read the raw file data yourself.

Choose the Right Way to Access Files

Although you can open any file and read its contents as a stream of bytes, doing so is not always the right choice. macOS and iOS provide built-in support that makes opening many types of standard file formats (such as text files, images, sounds, and property lists) much easier. For these standard file formats, use the higher-level options for reading and writing the file contents. Table 2-1 lists the common file types supported by the system along with information about how you access them.

**Table 2-1** File types with specialized routines
File Type	Examples	Description
Resource files	Nib files Image files Sound files Strings files Localized resources	Apps use resource files to store data that is independent of the code that uses it. Resource files are commonly used to store localizable content such as strings and images. The process for reading data from a resource file depends on the resource type. For information about how to read the contents of resource files, see Resource Programming Guide.
Text files	Plain text file UTF-8 formatted file UTF-16 formatted file	A text file is an unstructured sequence of ASCII or Unicode characters. You typically load the contents of a text file into an `NSString` object but may also read and write a text file as a raw stream of characters. For information about using the `NSString` class to load text from a file, see String Programming Guide.
Structured data files	XML file Property list file Preference file	A structured data file usually consists of string-based data arranged using a set of special characters. For information about parsing XML, see Event-Driven XML Programming Guide.
Archive files	Binary files created using a keyed archiver object	An archive is a file format used to store a persistent version of your app’s runtime objects. An archiver object encodes the state of the objects into a stream of bytes that can be written to disk all at once. An unarchiver reverses the process, using the stream of bytes to re-create the objects and restore them to their previous state. Archives are often a convenient alternative to implementing custom binary file formats for your documents or other data files. For information on how to create and read archive files, see Archives and Serializations Programming Guide.
File packages	Custom document formats	A file package is a directory that contains any number of custom data files but which is presented to the user as if it were a single file. Apps can use file packages to implement complex file formats that contain multiple distinct files, or a mixture of different types of files. For example, you might use a file package if your file format includes both a binary data file and one or more image, video, or audio files. You access the contents of a file package using `NSFileWrapper` objects, as described in Using FileWrappers as File Containers.
Bundles	Apps Plug-ins Frameworks	Bundles provide a structured environment for storing code and the resources used by that code. Most of the time, you do not work with the bundle itself but with its contents. However, you can locate bundles and obtain information about them as needed. For information about bundles and how you access them, see Bundle Programming Guide
Code files	Binary code resources Dynamic shared libraries	Apps that work with plug-ins and shared libraries need to be able to load the associated code for that item to take advantage of its functionality. For information about how to load code resources into memory, see Code Loading Programming Topics.

In situations where the standard file formats are insufficient, you can always create your own custom file formats. When reading and writing the content of custom files, you read and write data as a stream of bytes and apply those bytes to your app’s file-related data structures. You have complete control over how you read and write the bytes and how you manage your file-related data structures. For more information about the techniques for reading and writing files that use custom file formats, see Techniques for Reading and Writing Files Without File Coordinators.

Specifying the Path to a File or Directory

The preferred way to specify the location of a file or directory is to use the NSURL class. Although the NSString class has many methods related to path creation, URLs offer a more robust way to locate files and directories. For apps that also work with network resources, URLs also mean that you can use one type of object to manage items located on a local file system or on a network server.

Note: In addition to NSURL, you can also use the CFURLRef opaque type to manipulate paths as URLs. The NSURL class is toll-free bridged with the CFURLRef type, which means you can use them interchangeably in your code. For more information about how to create and manipulate URLs using Core Foundation, see CFURL Reference.

For most URLs, you build the URL by concatenating directory and file names together using the appropriate NSURL methods until you have the path to the item. A URL built in that way is referred to as a path-based URL because it stores the names needed to traverse the directory hierarchy to locate the item. (You also build string-based paths by concatenating directory and file-names together, with the results stored in a slightly different format than that used by the NSURL class.) In addition to path-based URLs, you can also create a file reference URL, which identifies the location of the file or directory using a unique ID.

All of the following entries are valid references to a file called MyFile.txt in a user’s Documents directory:

Path-based URL:file://localhost/Users/steve/Documents/MyFile.txt

File reference URL:file:///.file/id=6571367.2773272/

String-based path:/Users/steve/Documents/MyFile.txt

You create URL objects using the NSURL methods and convert them to file reference URLs only when needed. Path-based URLs are easier to manipulate, easier to debug, and are generally preferred by classes such as NSFileManager. An advantage of file reference URLs is that they are less fragile than path-based URLs while your app is running. If the user moves a file in the Finder, any path-based URLs that refer to the file immediately become invalid and must be updated to the new path. However, as long as the file moved to another location on the same disk, its unique ID does not change and any file reference URLs remain valid.

Important: Although they are safe to use while your app is running, file reference URLs are not safe to store and reuse between launches of your app because a file’s ID may change if the system is rebooted. If you want to store the location of a file persistently between launches of your app, create a bookmark as described in Locating Files Using Bookmarks.

Of course, there are still times when you might need to use strings to refer to a file. Fortunately, the NSURL class provides methods to convert path-based URLs to and from NSString objects. You might use a string-based path when presenting that path to the user or when calling a system routine that accepts strings instead of URLs. The conversion between NSURL objects and NSString objects is done using the NSURL class’s method absoluteString.

Because NSURL and NSString describe only the location of a file or directory, you can create them before the actual file or directory exists. Neither class attempts to validate the actual existence of the file or directory you specify. In fact, you must create the path to a nonexistent file or directory before you can create it on disk.

If you have an NSURL object that refers to an actual file or directory on disk, and you want to get the user visible name of the volume on which it resides, you use the method getResourceValue:forKey:error: in a two step process:

Use the NSURLVolumeURLKey constant to obtain the volume URL from the resource URL.
Use the NSURLLocalizedNameKey constant to obtain the user visible volume name from the volume URL.

Use the NSURLLocalizedNameKey constant rather than the NSURLNameKey constant. Using NSURLNameKey returns the name of the volume in the file system, which may not be the same as the user visible name. Listing 2-1 demonstrates this process for the current user’s home directory.

Listing 2-1 Obtaining the user visible volume name for a resource URL

For more information about the methods you use to create and manipulate URLs and strings, see NSURL Class Reference and NSString Class Reference.

Locating Items in the File System

Before you can access a file or directory, you need to know its location. There are several ways to locate files and directories:

Find the file yourself.
Ask the user to specify a location.
Locating files in the standard system directories, in both sandboxed and non-sandboxed apps.
Using bookmarks.

The file systems of iOS and macOS impose specific guidelines on where you should place files, so most of the items your app creates or uses should be stored in a well-known place. Both systems provide interfaces for locating items in such well-known places, and your app can use these interfaces to locate items and build paths to specific files. An app should prompt the user to specify the location of a file or directory only in a limited number of situations that are described in Using the Open and Save Panels.

Asking the User to Locate an Item

In macOS, user interactions with the file system should always be through the standard Open and Save panels. Because these panels involve interrupting the user, use them only in a limited number of situations:

To open user documents
To ask the user where to save a new document
To associate user files (or directories of files) with an open window

Never use the Open and Save panels to access any files that your app created and uses internally. Support files, caches, and app-generated data files should be placed in one of the standard directories dedicated to app-specific files.

For information on how to present and customize the Open and Save panels, see Using the Open and Save Panels.

Locating Items in Your App Bundle

Apps that need to locate resource files inside their bundle directory (or inside another known bundle) must do so using an NSBundle object. Bundles eliminate the need for your app to remember the location of individual files by organizing those files in a specific way. The methods of the NSBundle class understand that organization and use it to locate your app’s resources on demand. The advantage of this technique is that you can generally rearrange the contents of your bundle without rewriting the code you use to access it. Bundles also take advantage of the current user’s language settings to locate an appropriately localized version of a resource file.

The following code shows how to retrieve a URL object for an image named MyImage.png that is located in the app’s main bundle. This code determines only the location of the file; it does not open the file. You would pass the returned URL to a method of the NSImage class to load the image from disk so that you could use it.

For more information about bundles, including how to locate items in a bundle, see Bundle Programming Guide. For specific information about loading and using resources in your app, see Resource Programming Guide.

Locating Items in the Standard Directories

When you need to locate a file in one of the standard directories, use the system frameworks to locate the directory first and then use the resulting URL to build a path to the file. The Foundation framework includes several options for locating the standard system directories. By using these methods, the paths will be correct whether your app is sandboxed or not:

The URLsForDirectory:inDomains: method of the NSFileManager class returns a directory’s location packaged in an NSURL object. The directory to search for is an NSSearchPathDirectory constant. These constants provide URLs for the user’s home directory, as well as most of the standard directories.
The NSSearchPathForDirectoriesInDomains function behaves like the URLsForDirectory:inDomains: method but returns the directory’s location as a string-based path. Use the URLsForDirectory:inDomains: method instead.
The NSHomeDirectory function returns the path to either the user’s or app’s home directory. (Which home directory is returned depends on the platform and whether the app is in a sandbox.) When an app is sandboxed the home directory points to the app’s sandbox, otherwise it points to the User’s home directory on the file system. If constructing a file to a subdirectory of a user’s home directory, consider using the URLsForDirectory:inDomains: method instead.

You can use the URL or path-based string you receive from the preceding routines to build new objects with the locations of the files you want. Both the NSURL and NSString classes provide path-related methods for adding and removing path components and making changes to the path in general. Listing 2-2 shows an example that searches for the standard Application Support directory and creates a new URL for a directory containing the app’s data files.

Listing 2-2 Creating a URL for an item in the app support directory

Locating Files Using Bookmarks

If you want to save the location of a file persistently, use the bookmark capabilities of NSURL. A bookmark is an opaque data structure, enclosed in an NSData object, that describes the location of a file. Whereas path- and file reference URLs are potentially fragile between launches of your app, a bookmark can usually be used to re-create a URL to a file even in cases where the file was moved or renamed.

To create a bookmark for an existing URL, use the bookmarkDataWithOptions:includingResourceValuesForKeys:relativeToURL:error: method of NSURL. Specifying the NSURLBookmarkCreationSuitableForBookmarkFile option creates an NSData object suitable for saving to disk. Listing 2-3 shows a simple example implementation that uses this method to create a bookmark data object.

Listing 2-3 Converting a URL to a persistent form

If you write the persistent bookmark data to disk using the writeBookmarkData:toURL:options:error: method of NSURL, what the system creates on disk is an alias file. Aliases are similar to symbolic links but are implemented differently. Normally, users create aliases from the Finder when they want to create links to files elsewhere on the system.

To transform a bookmark data object back into a URL, use the URLByResolvingBookmarkData:options:relativeToURL:bookmarkDataIsStale:error: method of NSURL. Listing 2-4 shows the process for converting a bookmark back into a URL.

Listing 2-4 Returning a persistent bookmark to its URL form

The Core Foundation framework provides a set of C-based functions that parallel the bookmark interface provided by NSURL. For more information about using those functions, see CFURL Reference.

Enumerating the Contents of a Directory

To discover the contents of a given directory, you enumerate that directory. Cocoa supports enumerating a directory one file at a time or all at once. Regardless of which option you choose, enumerate directories sparingly. Each enumeration can touch a large number of files and subdirectories. This quickly becomes expensive.

Enumerating a Directory One File at a Time

Enumerating a directory one file at a time is recommended when you want to search for a specific file and stop enumerating when you find it. File-by-file enumeration uses the NSDirectoryEnumerator class, which defines the methods for retrieving items. Because NSDirectoryEnumerator itself is an abstract class, however, you do not create instances of it directly. Instead, you use either the enumeratorAtURL:includingPropertiesForKeys:options:errorHandler: or the enumeratorAtPath: method of NSFileManager object to obtain a concrete instance of the class for use in your enumeration.

Enumerator objects return the paths of all files and directories contained within the enumerated directory. Because enumerations are recursive and cross device boundaries, the number of files and directories returned may be more than what is present in the starting directory. You can skip the contents of any directory you are not interested in by calling the enumerator object’s skipDescendents method. Enumerator objects do not resolve symbolic links or attempt to traverse symbolic links that point to directories.

Listing 2-5 shows how to use the enumeratorAtURL:includingPropertiesForKeys:options:errorHandler: method to list all the user-visible subdirectories of a given directory, noting whether they are directories or file packages. The keys array tells the enumerator object to prefetch and cache information for each item. Prefetching this information improves efficiency by touching the disk only once. The options argument specifies that the enumeration should not list the contents of file packages and hidden files. The error handler is a block object that returns a Boolean value. If the block returns YES, the enumeration continues after the error; if it returns NO, the enumeration stops.

Listing 2-5 Enumerating the contents of a directory

You can use other methods declared by NSDirectoryEnumerator to determine attributes of files during the enumeration—both of the parent directory and the current file or directory—and to control recursion into subdirectories. The code in Listing 2-6 enumerates the contents of a directory and lists files that have been modified within the last 24 hours; if, however, it comes across RTFD file packages, it skips recursion into them.

Listing 2-6 Looking for files that have been modified recently

Getting the Contents of a Directory in a Single Batch Operation

If you know that you want to look at every item in a directory, you can retrieve a snapshot of the items and iterate over them at your convenience. Retrieving the contents of a directory in a batch operation is not the most efficient way to enumerate a directory, because the file manager must walk the entire directory contents every time. However, if you plan to look at all the items anyway, it is a much simpler way to retrieve the items.

There are two options for doing a batch enumeration of a directory using NSFileManager:

To perform a shallow enumeration, use the contentsOfDirectoryAtURL:includingPropertiesForKeys:options:error: or contentsOfDirectoryAtPath:error: method.
To perform a deep enumeration and return only subdirectories, use the subpathsOfDirectoryAtPath:error: method.

Listing 2-7 shows an example that uses the contentsOfDirectoryAtURL:includingPropertiesForKeys:options:error: method to enumerate the contents of a directory. One of the benefits of using URLs is that you can also efficiently retrieve additional information about each item. This example retrieves the localized name, creation date, and type information for each item in the directory and stores that information in the corresponding NSURL object. When the method returns, you can proceed to iterate over the items in the array variable and do what you need with them.

Listing 2-7 Retrieving the list of items in a directory all at once

Determining Where to Store Your App-Specific Files

The Library directory is the designated repository for files your app creates and manages on behalf of the user. Consider that these directories may be in different locations if your app is sandboxed. As a result, always use the NSFileManager method URLsForDirectory:inDomains: with the NSUserDomainMask as the domain to locate the specific directory that you should use to store this data.

Use the Application Support directory constant NSApplicationSupportDirectory, appending your <bundle_ID> for:
- Resource and data files that your app creates and manages for the user. You might use this directory to store app state information, computed or downloaded data, or even user created data that you manage on behalf of the user.
- Autosave files.
Use the Caches directory constant NSCachesDirectory, appending your <bundle_ID> directory for cached data files or any files that your app can re-create easily.
Read and write preferences using the NSUserDefaults class. This class automatically writes preferences to the appropriate location.
Use the NSFileManager method URLsForDirectory:inDomains: to get the directory for storing temporary files. Temporary files are files you intend to use immediately for some ongoing operation but then plan to discard later. Delete temporary files as soon as you are done with them.
Important: If you do not delete temporary files after three days, the system may delete them for you whether you are using them or not.

Note: Apps rarely share the files stored in the Application Support, Caches or Temp directories. Therefore, you don’t typically need to use a file coordinator (NSFileCoordinator) when reading or writing to these locations. For more information about file coordination, see The Role of File Coordinators and Presenters.

Tips for Accessing Files and Directories

How to set default app for developer files mac osx

Because the file system is a resource shared by all processes, including system processes, use it carefully. Even on systems with solid-state disk drives, file operations tend to be a little slower because of the latency involved in retrieving data from the disk. And when you do access files, it is important that you do so in a way that is secure and does not interfere with other processes.

Perform File Operations Lazily

Operations involving the file system should be performed only when they are absolutely necessary. Accessing the file system usually takes a lot of time relative to other computer-wide tasks. So make sure you really need to access the disk before you do. Specifically:

Write data to disk only when you have something valuable to save. The definition of what is valuable is different for each app but should generally involve information that the user provides explicitly. For example, if your app creates some default data structures at launch time, do not save those structures to disk unless the user changes them.
Read data from disk only when you need it. In other words, load data that you need for your user interface now but do not load an entire file just to get one small piece of data from that file. For custom file formats, use file mapping or read only the few chunks of a file that you need to present your user interface. Read any remaining chunks as needed in response to user interactions with the data. For structured data formats, use Core Data to manage and optimize the reading of data for you.

Use Secure Coding Practices

There are several principles you can follow to help ensure that you do not have file-based security vulnerabilities in your program:

Check the result codes for any functions or methods you call. Result codes are there to let you know that there is a problem, so do pay attention to them. For example, if you try to delete a directory that you think is empty and get an error code, you might find that the directory is not empty after all.
When working in a directory to which your process does not have exclusive access, you must check to make sure a file does not exist before you create it. You must also verify that the file you intend to read from or write to is the same file you created.
Whenever possible use routines that operate on file descriptors rather than pathnames. In this way you can be sure you’re always dealing with the same file.
Intentionally create files as a separate step from opening them so that you can verify that you are opening a file you created rather than one that already existed
Know whether the function you are calling follows symbolic links. For example, the lstat function gives you the status of a file regardless of whether it’s a normal file or a symbolic link, but the stat function follows symbolic links and, if the specified file was a symbolic link, returns the status of the linked-to file. Therefore, if you use the stat function, you might be accessing a different file than you expected.
Before you read a file, make sure that file has the owner and permissions you expect. Be prepared to fail gracefully (rather than hanging) if it does not.
Set your process’ file code creation mask (umask) to restrict access to files created by your process. The umask is a bitmask that alters the default permissions of a new file. You do not reset the umask for your app, your process inherits the umask from its parent process. For more information about setting the umask, see the umask(2) man page.

For additional tips and coding practices, see Race Conditions and Secure File Operations in Secure Coding Guide.

Assume Case Sensitivity for Paths

When searching or comparing filenames, always assume that the underlying file system is case sensitive. macOS supports many file systems that use case to differentiate between files. Even on file systems (such as APFS and HFS+) that support case insensitivity, there are still times when case may be used to compare filenames. For example, the NSBundle class and CFBundle APIs consider case when searching bundle directories for named resources.

Include Filename Extensions for New Files

All files should have a filename extension that reflects the type of content contained in the file. Filename extensions help the system determine how to open files and also make it easier to exchange files with other computers or other platforms. For example, network transfer programs often use filename extensions to determine the best way to to transfer files between computers.

Use Display Names When Presenting Items

Whenever you need to present the name of a file or directory in your user interface, always use the item’s display name. Using the display name ensures that what your app presents matches what the Finder and other apps are presenting. For example, if your app shows the path to a file, using the display name ensures that the path is localized in accordance with the current user’s language settings.

For more information about display names, see Files and Directories Can Have Alternate Names.

Accessing Files Safely from Background Threads

In general, the objects and functions used to access and manipulate files can be used from any thread of your app. However, as with all threaded programming, make sure you manipulate files safely from your background threads:

Avoid using the same file descriptor from multiple threads. Doing so could cause each thread to disrupt the state of the other.
Always use file coordinators to access files. File coordinators provide notifications when other threads in your program (or other processes) access the same file. You can use these notifications to clean up your local data structures or perform other relevant tasks.
Create a unique instance of NSFileManager for each thread when copying, moving, linking, or deleting files. Although most file manager operations are thread-safe, operations involving a delegate require a unique instance of NSFileManager, especially if you are performing those operations on background threads.

macOS (previously known as OS X or Mac OS X) is Apple's operating system for the Mac line of computers. It's a UNIX platform, based on the Darwin kernel, and behaves largely similar to other UNIX-like platforms. The main difference is that X11 is not used as the windowing system. Instead, macOS uses its own native windowing system that is accessible through the Cocoa API.

To download and install Qt for macOS, follow the instructions on the Getting Started with Qt page.

Supported Versions

When talking about version support on macOS, it's important to distinguish between the build environment; the platform you're building on or with, and the target platforms; the platforms you are building for. The following macOS versions are supported.

Target Platform	Architecture	Build Environment
macOS 10.13, 10.14, 10.15	`x86_64` and `x86_64h`	Xcode 11 (10.15 SDK)

Build Environment

How To Set Default App For Developer Files Mac Catalina

The build environment on macOS is defined entirely by the Xcode version used to build your application. Xcode contains both a toolchain (compiler, linker, and other tools), and a macOS platform-SDK (headers and libraries). Together these define how your application is built.

Note: The version of macOS that you are running Xcode on does not matter. As long as Apple ships a given Xcode version that runs on your operating system, the build environment will be defined by that Xcode version.

Xcode can be downloaded from Apple's developer website (including older versions of Xcode). Once installed, choosing an Xcode installation is done using the xcode-select tool.

You can inspect the globally selected Xcode installation using the same tool.

The xcrun command can then be used to find a particular tool in the toolchain.

or show the platform SDK path used when building.

How To Set Default App For Developer Files Mac Osx

Target Platforms

Building for macOS utilizes a technique called weak linking that allows you to build your application against the headers and libraries of the latest platform SDK, while still allowing your application to be deployed to macOS versions lower than the SDK version. When the binary is run on a macOS version lower than the SDK it was built with, Qt will check at runtime whether or not a platform feature is available before utilizing it.

In theory this would allow running your application on every single macOS version released, but for practical (and technical) reasons there is a lower limit to this range, known as the deployment target of your application. If the binary is launched on a macOS version below the deployment target macOS or Qt will give an error message and the application will not run.

Qt expresses the deployment target via the QMAKE_MACOSX_DEPLOYMENT_TARGET qmake variable, which has a default value set via the makespec for macOS. You should not need to change this default, but if needed you can increase it in your project file:

Note: You should not lower the deployment target beyond the default value set by Qt. Doing so will likely lead to crashes at runtime if the binary is then deployed to a macOS version lower than what Qt expected to run on.

By always building against the latest available platform SDK, you ensure that Qt can take advantage of new features introduced in recent versions of macOS.

For more information about SDK-based development on macOS, see Apple's developer documentation.

Opting out of macOS behavior changes

One caveat to using the latest Xcode version and SDK to build your application is that macOS's system frameworks will sometimes decide whether or not to enable behavior changes based on the SDK you built your application with.

For example, when dark-mode was introduced in macOS 10.14 Mojave, macOS would only treat applications built against the 10.14 SDK as supporting dark-mode, and would leave applications built against earlier SDKs with the default light mode look. This technique allows Apple to ensure that binaries built long before the new SDK and operating system was released will still continue to run without regressions on new macOS releases.

A consequence of this is that if Qt has problems dealing with some of these macOS features (dark-mode, layer-backed views), the only way to opt out of them is building with an earlier SDK (the 10.13 SDK, available through Xcode 9). This is a last-resort solution, and should only be applied if your application has no other ways of working around the problem.

Architectures

How To Set Default App For Developer Files Mac 10

By default, Qt is built for x86_64. To build for x86_64h (Haswell). use the QMAKE_APPLE_DEVICE_ARCHSqmake variable. This is selectable at configure time:

QMAKE_APPLE_DEVICE_ARCHS can also be specified as a space-delimited list in order to build for multiple architectures simultaneously:

Additional Command-Line Options

On the command-line, applications can be built using qmake and make. Optionally, qmake can generate project files for Xcode with -spec macx-xcode. If you are using the binary package, qmake generates Xcode projects by default; use -spec macx-gcc to generate makefiles. For example:

Configuring with -spec macx-xcode generates an Xcode project file from project.pro. With qmake you do not have to worry about rules for Qt's preprocessors (moc and uic) since qmake automatically handles them and ensures that everything necessary is linked into your application.

Qt does not entirely interact with the development environment (for example plugins to set a file to 'mocable' from within the Xcode user interface).

The result of the build process is an application bundle, which is a directory structure that contains the actual application executable. The application can be launched by double-clicking it in Finder, or by referring directly to its executable from the command line, for example, myApp.app/Contents/MacOS/myApp.

If you wish to have a command-line tool that does not use the GUI for example, moc, uic or ls, you can tell qmake to disable bundle creation from the CONFIG variable in the project file:

Deploying Applications on macOS

macOS applications are typically deployed as self-contained application bundles. The application bundle contains the application executable as well as dependencies such as the Qt libraries, plugins, translations and other resources you may need. Third party libraries like Qt are normally not installed system-wide; each application provides its own copy.

A common way to distribute applications is to provide a compressed disk image (.dmg file) that the user can mount in Finder. The deployment tool, macdeployqt (available from the macOS installers), can be used to create the self-contained bundles, and optionally also create a .dmg archive. Applications can also be distributed through the Mac App Store. Qt 5 aims to stay within the app store sandbox rules. macdeployqt (bin/macdeployqt) can be used as a starting point for app store deployment.

Note: For selling applications in the macOS App Store, special rules apply. In order to pass validation, the application must verify the existence of a valid receipt before executing any code. Since this is a copy protection mechanism, steps should be taken to avoid common patterns and obfuscate the code that validates the receipt as much as possible. Thus, this cannot be automated by Qt, but requires some platform-specific code written specifically for the application itself. More information can be found in Apple's documentation.

macOS Issues

The page below covers specific issues and recommendations for creating macOS applications.

Where to Go from Here

We invite you to explore the rest of Qt. We prepared overviews to help you decide which APIs to use and our examples demonstrate how to use our API.

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