Manually Building qBittorrent on Mac

Posted on Edited on In Disqus:

Cause

Recently the pressure of graduation has been quite heavy, so I wanted to download a movie from Beiyouren and relax a bit. But I found that qBittorrent, the BitTorrent client I had always used for seeding and downloading, could no longer open. I searched online for quite a while for the cause and solution.

I finally confirmed that the culprit was a Mac update. qBittorrent was treated as an app with incomplete verification: Issue 11570.
There are two solutions:

  • Disable Apple’s security checks
  • Manually build the app yourself

For certain reasons, I could not make too many system-level changes to the Mac. So I had to try the second solution. It turned out that manually building qBittorrent was not simple; one whole afternoon passed like that, and I did not get to watch the movie either. To make it easier for classmates with the same problem to reference, I record my solution here. During my build process, I did not find similar tutorials or references online, and there were indeed quite a few pitfalls.

Steps

If there is no Qt environment before, ./configure will report an error that it cannot find qmake. The corresponding environment needs to be configured.

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brew install qt
echo 'export PATH="/usr/local/opt/qt/bin:$PATH"' >> ~/.zshrc
export PATH="/usr/local/opt/qt/bin:$PATH"
export LDFLAGS="-L/usr/local/opt/qt/lib"
export CPPFLAGS="-I/usr/local/opt/qt/include"
export PKG_CONFIG_PATH="/usr/local/opt/qt/lib/pkgconfig

If there is no boost environment before, it will report an error that it cannot find boostlib:

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checking for boostlib >= 1.65 (106500)... configure: We could not detect the boost libraries (version 1.65 or higher). If you have a staged boost library (still not installed) please specify $BOOST_ROOT in your environment and do not give a PATH to --with-boost option.  If you are sure you have boost installed, then check your version number looking in <boost/version.hpp>. See http://randspringer.de/boost for more documentation.
configure: error: Could not find Boost

The boost environment needs to be installed.

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brew install boost
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brew install libtorrent-rasterbar

If you encounter this error,

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Error: Directory not empty @ dir_s_rmdir - /usr/local/opt/openssl

you can delete the corresponding folder or change its owner with chown.

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brew cleanup
sudo rm -rf /usr/local/Cellar/openssl/1.0.2q

After I ran brew install libtorrent-rasterbar and then ./configure, I still ran into a wrong-version problem for that library:

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Requested 'libtorrent-rasterbar >= 1.2.11' but version of libtorrent-rasterbar is 1.2.10

Because the brew formula only had 1.2.10, we had to manually build a newer version.

Go to GitHub and find the source code for the corresponding version of libtorrent-rasterbar: download. Compile and install it according to the build instructions in the documentation.

For Mac:

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brew install boost-build boost openssl@1.1
echo "using darwin ;" >>~/user-config.jam
b2 crypto=openssl cxxstd=17 openssl-lib=/usr/local/Cellar/openssl@1.1/1.1.1j/lib openssl-include=/usr/local/Cellar/openssl@1.1/1.1.1j/include release
b2 crypto=openssl cxxstd=17 openssl-lib=/usr/local/Cellar/openssl@1.1/1.1.1j/lib openssl-include=/usr/local/Cellar/openssl@1.1/1.1.1j/include install --prefix=/usr/local
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export libtorrent_LIBS="-L/usr/local/lib"
export libtorrent_CFLAGS="-I/usr/local/include"
export openssl_CFLAGS="-I/usr/local/Cellar/openssl@1.1/1.1.1j/include"
export openssl_LIBS="-L/usr/local/Cellar/openssl@1.1/1.1.1j/lib"
./configure
make && make install
qbittorrent

In addition, you can also refer to some other official compilation and build documents. They provide build options using CMake or Qt Creator.