Build PyQt4 into your virtualenv

Here I’ll show the steps to build and install PyQt4 inside a virtualenv.

These instructions are related to Mac OS X and Linux systems only.

SIP

First build and install the SIP binaries:

cd sip
python configure.py --incdir=${VIRTUAL_ENV}/include
make -j2
make install

The ${VIRTUAL_ENV} environmental variable will automatically point to the path of your virtualenv installation.

The -j option tells make to spawn up to 2 processes to do the job. This number should be equal to the number of physical CPU cores available on your machine; -j option can be omitted, in this case only one core will be used.

PyQt4

Now it’s time to build the PyQt4 bindings (it will take a little time):

cd PyQt4
python configure.py [-q <qmake_path>]
make -j2
make install

The <qmake_path> is the full path of the qmake program of the Qt toolkit. Passing the -q parameter is optional and useful only if the configure.py script cannot find the Qt library automatically.

The End

Last step before trying to load the bindings; exporting the path of the virtualenv’s dynamic libraries:

export DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH=${VIRTUAL_ENV}/lib

Can be a good idea to export the `DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH` automatically when entering your virtualenv

To finally test if the build and installation of SIP an PyQt4 are successful start the virtualenv’s Python interpreter and type:

>>> import sip; print sip.SIP_VERSION_STR
4.14.2
>>> from PyQt4 import QtCore; print QtCore.PYQT_VERSION_STR
4.9.6

If no error or warning is raised and the release numbers of SIP and PyQt4 are displayed your installation is successful.