Setup of Development Environment

In order to create your own Impresario Macro libraries or to build Impresario yourself from its source code, you need a development enviroment.

In general three components are required:

  • Qt Framework version 5.15 or higher with QtCreator.
  • A suitable compiler for QtCreator. The compiler must support at least the C++11 standard.
  • Git as version control system

The following two subsections show how to set it up on Windows and Linux systems.

Setup for Windows systems

On Windows systems Impresario supports Microsoft’s C++ compilers which are shipped with Visual Studio. At the time of this writing Impresario is built with the compiler shipped with Visual Studio 2019. Therefore this one is recommended.

  • Go to http://www.qt.io/download-open-source/ and download the Qt Online Installer for Windows.
  • Run the downloaded installer. After creating a Qt account (it’s free) you can choose which Qt components to install. The following screenshot shows what is needed by Impresario:
    Qt components to be installed on Windows

    Qt components on Windows (Click to enlarge)

    Next to the pre-build Qt core libraries for the compiler it is also mandatory to install the Qt WebEngine component which is used by Impresario’s help system.
  • Download Visual Studio 2019 Community Edition free of charge from https://visualstudio.microsoft.com/de/vs/older-downloads/. Visual Studion 2019 may have been moved to the older versions section so that you have to browse for it. After download run the installer.
  • Download Git for Windows from https://git-scm.com/download/win. Afterwards, run the installer.

Setup for Linux systems

On Linux systems the GNU 64bit gcc is the compiler of choice.

  • Go to http://www.qt.io/download-open-source/ and download the Qt Online Installer for Linux.
  • Run the downloaded installer. After creating a Qt account (it’s free) you can choose which Qt components to install. The following screenshot shows what is needed by Impresario:
    Qt components to be installed on Linux

    Qt components on Linux (Click to enlarge)

    Next to the pre-build Qt core libraries for the compiler it is also mandatory to install the Qt WebEngine component which is used by Impresario’s help system.
  • If not already installed on your system you have to install gcc and git. On Debian based systems like Ubuntu or Linux Mint with apt package manager this is achieved by running 
      sudo apt-get install build-essential git
    from the command line. On Linux distributions with a different package management system please refer to its documentation.