How to copy dynamic libraries (.dll) into binary output directory after build?

[xahon]

I want to automate build of my rust project using Qt and copy all required dlls into the output directory. How do I do that? I don't want to mess around with hardcoding paths to libraries, is there a flexible cross-platform solution?

[ahayzen-kdab]

This is more a problem on the deployment side than on the building side, but in the Qt world there are tools to help with this.

Eg on Windows there is windeployqt that attempts to copy the relevant libraries to your runtime folder https://doc.qt.io/qt-6/windows-deployment.html#the-windows-deployment-tool For linux there are tools like linuxdeployqt to make an appimage or using a flatpak with the KDE runtime would likely work. And I assume there are similar tools available for macOS.

Note that you could also use static linking with Qt instead as discussed in the Qt article https://doc.qt.io/qt-6/deployment.html

So you'll likely want to call these command line tools as part of your build, I'm unsure whether we can do something in the build.rs, but maybe we could extend qt-build-utils to provide enough info to know the paths that would need to be copied ?