Package Details

Having a large project as the Qt Framework available from one simple installation line:

pip install pyside6

is really beneficial, but it might be confusing to newcomers.

Besides your IDE, you don’t need to install anything else to develop your Qt application, because the same command installs many tools that will help you design UIs, use QML types, generate files automatically, translate applications, etc.

Package Dependencies

Starting from 6.3.0, the pyside6 package (wheel) is almost empty, and only includes references to other packages that are required to properly use all the modules. This packages are:

• pyside6-essentials, essential Qt modules,

• pyside6-addons, additional Qt modules,

• shiboken6, a utility Python module.

You can verify this by running pip list to check the installed packages in your Python (virtual) environment:

(env) % pip list
Package            Version
------------------ -------
pip                22.0.4
PySide6            6.3.0
PySide6-Addons     6.3.0
PySide6-Essentials 6.3.0
setuptools         58.1.0
shiboken6          6.3.0

Both pyside6-essentials and pyside6-addons contain Qt binaries (.so, .dll, or .dylib) that are used by the Python wrappers that enable you to use the Qt modules from Python. For example, in the QtCore module, you will find on Linux:

• PySide6/QtCore.abi3.so, and

• PySide6/Qt/lib/libQt6Core.so.6

inside the site-packages directory of your (virtual) environment. The first is the importable module which depends on the second file which is the original QtCore library.

Note

The package shiboken6-generator is not a dependency, and it’s not available on PyPi. The reason, is that it depends on libclang, which is a large library that we don’t package, and requires a special configuration for you to use. Check the Shiboken Documentation for more details.

Tools Included

Following the same idea from the modules, we also include in the packages (wheels) Qt tools that are important for any Qt application development workflow, like uic, rcc, etc.

All the tools must be used from the PySide wrappers, and not directly. For example, if exploring the site-packages/ directory on your installation you find uic.exe (on Windows), you should not click on that, and use pyside6-uic.exe instead. The reason for this is the proper setup of PATHs, plugins, and more, to properly work with the installed Python package.

Here you can find all the tools we include in Qt for Python starting from 6.3.0, grouped by different topics:

Project development

• pyside6-project, to build Qt Designer forms (.ui files), resource files (.qrc) and QML type files (.qmltype) from a .pyproject file.

Widget Development

• pyside6-designer, drag-and-drop tool for designing Widget UIs (generates .ui files,

  see Using .ui files from Designer or QtCreator with QUiLoader and pyside6-uic).

• pyside6-uic, to generate Python code from .ui form files.

• pyside6-rcc, to generate serialized data from .qrc resources files. Keep in mind these files can be used in other non-widget projects.

QML Development

• pyside6-qmllint, that verifies the syntactic validity of QML files.

• pyside6-qmltyperegistrar, to read metatypes files and generate files that contain the necessary code to register all the types marked with relevant macros.

• pyside6-qmlimportscanner, to identify the QML modules imported from a

  project/QML files and dump the result as a JSON array.

• pyside6-qmlcachegen, to compile QML to bytecode at compile time for bundling inside the

  binary.

• pyside6-qmlsc, that replaces pyside6-qmlcachegen. This tool generates C++ code in

  addition to byte code for functions it can exhaustively analyze. pyside6-qmlsc is commercial only.

Translations

• pyside6-linguist, for translating text in applications.

• pyside6-lrelease, to create run-time translation files for the application.

• pyside6-lupdate, to synchronize source code and translations.

Qt Help

• pyside6-assistant, for viewing online documentation in Qt Help file format. Read more about the formats on the QtHelp Framework page.

PySide Utilities

• pyside6-genpyi, to generate Python stubs (.pyi files) for Qt modules.

• pyside6-metaobjectdump, a tool to print out the metatype information in JSON to be used as input for qmltyperegistrar.

Deployment

• pyside6-deploy, to deploy PySide6 applications to desktop platforms - Linux, Windows and macOS.

• pyside6-android-deploy, to deploy PySide6 application as an Android app targeting different Android platforms - aarch64, armv7a, i686, x86_64.