.. _commercial-page: Commercial Use ============== |project| follows the same licensing that Qt has, which means that there are two distributions, the Community Edition (LGPLv3/GPLv3) and a Commercial Edition. For more information, check the `Qt Licensing`_ page. As a brief description, you can get the commercial |project| packages by having any of the following licenses: #. Qt for Application Development Professional (ADP) #. Qt for Application Development Enterprise (ADE) #. Qt for Device Creation Professional (DCP) #. Qt for Device Creation Enterprise (DCE) The only difference is that the ADP license **does not** include the extra ``Qt OPC UA``, ``Qt MQTT`` and ``Qt CoAP`` modules, which are distributed in a special Python wheel. |project| follows the same approach as Qt, meaning that commercial users will have access to both our commercial packages for any given version, or the special commercial LTS releases. Commercial users **should not** install the Community Edition distribution via ``pip install pyside6`` to avoid licensing problems, and should refer to the packages that can be acquired from the `Qt Account`_, the Qt Installer, or via the `qtpip` tool. Installation ------------ We understand that the installation of the commercial wheels will depend on your use cases. For this, we currently offer three ways to install a commercial Qt for Python release: a command line tool, using the Maintenance Tool, or downloading packages by hand. qtpip - a commercial wheel installer ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ `qtpip`_ is a wrapper around `pip`_ (the package installer for Python) that provides an integration with the detection of commercial licenses. It requires that a Qt license is present. On a fresh install, this can be done by launching the `Qt Maintenance Tool`_ first. To set up the tool, we recommend creating a virtual environment for your project, and then installing the tool like any other module: .. code-block:: bash # Create and activate a virtual environment first # then install 'qtpip' pip install qtpip # Now install pyside6 (or any of the Qt for Python packages) qtpip install pyside6 Besides the ``install`` command, you can also ``uninstall`` (like in pip) but you can also perform a `fulluninstall`` to fully remove all the Qt for Python packages. You can find more information running ``qtpip -h``:: $ qtpip -h Usage: qtpip [options] install fulluninstall Qt wrapper around pip. These arguments override pip's. For more, refer to pip --help Options: -f, --force Force installation if OSS wheels were already installed. --no-input Disable prompting for input. --no-cache-dir Disable the cache. --disable-pip-version-check Don't periodically check PyPI to determine whether a new version of pip is available for download. --no-color Suppress colored output. --user Install to the Python user install directory for your platform. --force-reinstall Reinstall all packages even if they are already up-to-date. -h, --help Displays help on commandline options. --help-all Displays help, including generic Qt options. -v, --version Displays version information. Arguments: install Installs a package, this can be any of PySide6, PySide6-Essentials, PySide6-Addons, shiboken6 or shiboken6-generator for the respective commercial wheel, or any other wheel from PyPi. fulluninstall Fully uninstalls all packages related to PySide6, shiboken6, or both. .. note:: The release cycle of ``qtpip`` will be independent from the Qt for Python one. Maintenance Tool ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ As a commercial user, you are able to download the commercial set of wheels from the `Qt Maintenance Tool`_. The same versions that are available for Qt/C++ are available for the Python bindings. The wheels will be downloaded, but not installed, mainly because they should be installed into a virtual environment rather than the default interpreter. A ``requirements.txt`` file will be provided alongside the wheels, in order to simplify the installation step:: pip install -r /path/to/Qt/QtForPython/6.6.0/requirements.txt Complementary to the wheels, you will be able to download the sources as well. .. note:: Wheels installed this way will be detectable by `Qt Creator`_, which will offer you to install them for your current Python interpreter. Using account.qt.io ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ Head to your `Qt Account`_ page, and select the **Download** option on the side menu. You will find an option to select |project| from the **Products** section: .. image:: products.png :alt: Products screenshot :align: center There are two options that will list a different set of packages: * **Qt for Python Commercial wheels** which are the non-LTS releases under commercial licensing, and include commercial only features and tools. Additionally, here is where you can find the *Qt for automation (M2M Protocols)* packages. * **Qt for Python (Commercial LTS)** where you will find the 5.15.x LTS and 6.2.x LTS releases. Once you select any of those, you will be able to select the version of the packages you want to download for the **Qt for Python Commercial wheels** packages: .. image:: versions_commercial.png :alt: Commercial versions screenshot :align: center and the **Qt for Python (Commercial LTS)** packages: .. image:: versions_lts.png :alt: LTS versions screenshot :align: center For any of the versions, you can download many packages depending on your Operating System (macOS, Windows, or Linux). To learn more about what the packages contain, please check the :ref:`package_details` page. Once you download the packages, you are encouraged to create a Python virtual environment to install them - check the :ref:`getting-started` page for how to do it. With your activated environment on a terminal, run the following command (for macOS/Linux):: pip install *.whl to install them all, and leave ``pip`` to resolve the dependencies among the packages, or for Windows do it by hand selecting the proper combination:: pip install shiboken6-... PySide6_Essentials-... PySide6-Addons... ... Alternatively for Windows, you can specify the following command which includes the version, and assumes that you are running it on the same directory where the wheels are:: pip install --no-index --find-links=. PySide6==6.4.0.commercial .. note:: As described in the :ref:`package_details` page, the dependency of the packages requires you to first install the ``shiboken6`` package, and then ``shiboken6-generator`` in case you are interested on binding generation; or ``PySide6_Essentials`` in case you want to use the essential modules. After the Essentials, you can optionally install the ``PySide6_Addons`` and ``PySide6_M2M`` depending on your needs. Qt Creator Integration ---------------------- *Qt Creator* offers the option to create new |project| projects from the main wizard. To execute the projects, make sure that the proper *Python Interpreter* is selected, so *Qt Creator* can use the commercial modules you just installed. Go to *Edit -> Preferences* where you can find the *Python* option that will show the following: .. image:: qtcreator_python.png :alt: Qt Creator Python options :align: center you can add, remove and modify environments. To include a new one, make sure to select the main Python executable from your environment. This can be found on ``path_to_your_env/bin/python`` (macOS and Linux), or ``path_to_your_env\python.exe`` (Windows). As an alternative, you can launch *Qt Creator* from within the virtual environment, detecting your installation automatically. Migrating from other versions ----------------------------- In case you have a virtual environment with the Open Source distribution, you need to first uninstall those packages with the ``pip uninstall `` command. To check if packages are installed, run ``pip list`` and look for ``shiboken`` or ``PySide`` packages. We always recommend creating a new virtual environment, so in doubt it is better to just remove the old ones if you have previous installations. The nature of virtual environments is volatile by design. Python Workflow --------------- The Qt framework is a C++ framework that we expose to Python with the help of Shiboken (binding generator), which allows us to create the PySide Python module. |project| tries to find a middle ground between how C++ and Python projects work, so there are many decisions that need to be made, one of them being that the distributing of the packages needs to follow the same Python workflow, which means creating Python packages (wheels) and distributing them in a way people can use the ``pip`` tool to install them. PyPi is the main platform to distribute Open Source packages, but when commercial packages are required the situation is different. Among all the alternatives we had, we initially decided to provide the packages (wheels) on the `Qt Account`_ platform, so people can download and install on demand, but we are investigating simple ways to improve this process. There have also been discussions regarding including |project| in the *Qt Maintenance Tool* but this creates a new level of complexity. The reasoning is that the tool would require people to select or create a Python virtual environment on a separate location for this to be installed. Additionally, the Python workflow considers virtual environments as very volatile. This means they get removed and created often, so reinstalling or updating the |project| packages will likely happen. .. _`Qt Licensing`: https://www.qt.io/licensing/ .. _`Qt Account`: https://account.qt.io .. _`Qt Maintenance Tool`: https://doc.qt.io/qt-6/qt-online-installation.html .. _`Qt Creator`: https://www.qt.io/product/development-tools .. _`qtpip`: https://pypi.org/project/qtpip/ .. _`pip`: https://pypi.org/project/pip/