On OS X, applications are built and run from a bundle: a single directory that contains the application binary and all its dependencies. In the Finder, these bundles are viewed as .app special directories.

When running gallery-desktop from Qt Creator, the application is already bundled in a .app file. Because we are using a custom library, gallery-core, this gallery-desktop.app does not contain all the dependencies and Qt Creator handles it for us.

What we aim to create is a script that completely packages gallery-desktop (gallery-core included) in a .dmg file, a Mac OS X disk image file that is mounted upon execution and lets the user install the application with ease.

To achieve this, Qt provides the macdeployqt tool, which gathers the dependencies and creates the .dmg file.

First, check that your environment variables are correctly set:

Create the scripts/package-macosx.sh file with the following content:

#!/bin/bash 
 
DIST_DIR=dist/desktop-macosx 
BUILD_DIR=build 
...