Building and Deploying Qt Applications for HarmonyOS

This page describes how to build and package a Qt application for HarmonyOS, and how to run it on a device or the emulator.

Packaging into a HAP

HarmonyOS applications ship as HarmonyOS Ability Packages (HAPs). When you create a Qt application executable with qt_add_executable() while targeting HarmonyOS, Qt automatically generates a <target>_make_hap build target. Building that target produces the HAP for your application:

cmake --build . --target <target>_make_hap

How deployment works

The <target>_make_hap target runs harmonydeployqt, the HarmonyOS deployment tool. It follows the same approach as androiddeployqt: it collects the application's shared library, the HarmonyOS platform plugin (libqohos.so), the required Qt modules, and, for Qt Quick applications, the QML modules, and places them into a HarmonyOS application template. It then invokes the OpenHarmony hvigor build tool to assemble the final HAP.

To configure the metadata written into the HarmonyOS manifests (app.json5 and module.json5) and to declare permissions, use the commands described in Qt for HarmonyOS CMake API.

Running the application

Install and run the resulting HAP on a connected HarmonyOS device or on the emulator. The most convenient way to deploy and debug is to open the generated project in DevEco Studio and use its run and debug tooling.