Getting Qt Sources from the Git repository

This page describes how to get the Qt sources from the public Git repositories. The Git repositories contain the latest development branches and released versions of Qt 6.

You can also get the Qt sources Qt Online Installer, through your Qt Account (commercial users), or from download.qt.io (open-source users).

You need a recent version of Git and CMake Documentation to run the init-repository tool when initializing the Git submodules.

Cloning the Qt repository

Qt is developed and maintained in several Git submodules in the main qt5.git repository. Getting the Qt sources from Git involves cloning the top-level Git repository through the command line.

These instructions use Unix-like shell syntax. On Windows, the commands are similar. The command below clones the current version of Qt 6 into a directory named qt.

git clone --branch v6.12.0 git://code.qt.io/qt/qt5.git qt

If the git protocol is blocked by your firewall, consider using HTTPS instead:

git clone --branch v6.12.0 https://code.qt.io/qt/qt5.git qt

After cloning, the qt directory contains the main Qt Git repository which contains setup files and uninitialized Qt submodules.

Initializing the Qt submodules

The qt5.git repository contains the Qt Modules as Git submodules. To initialize and clone the submodules, run the init-repository tool in the top-level directory.

./init-repository

On Windows, without a Linux environment, use init-repository.bat instead.

init-repository.bat

init-repository clones and initializes setup files to build the Qt sources. In addition, there are tools in the repository that help Qt contributors with creating patches, testing code, and generating documentation. For more information about contributing, visit the Contributing to Qt site.

If you already have a Qt repository in the same directory, you can pass -f to force init-repository to reinitialize the submodules.

./init-repository -f

Initializing Qt specific submodules

If you only need a specific set of Qt modules, initialize a minimal set of submodules using --module-subset as an argument to init-repository. For example, you can initialize only the Qt Essentials modules by specifying essential as the argument.

./init-repository --module-subset=essential

For Qt Add-Ons, use addon instead.

./init-repository --module-subset=addon

You can also select several submodules at the same time. For example, to initialize the qtgrpc and qtmqtt submodules along with their required submodules, run:

./init-repository --module-subset=qtgrpc,qtmqtt

The init-repository tool always initializes a minimum set of submodules.

For more information, consult the init-repository manual by setting -help as an argument:

./init-repository -help

After cloning and initializing

The next step is to configure and build Qt. Read the Building Qt Sources page for more information.