Easy PySide6 Setup

Desktop applications and me

It has been a long time since I played with a desktop app framework. A few years ago I have played with wxPython and PySide2.

The setup

After you installed Python...

Always, always use a virtual environment if you need to install any packages. There are quite a number of choices for virtual environments, e.g. venv (Python standard library), virtualenv, Pyenv, Poetry, .etc. miniconda/Anaconda could also be in consideration if you want fine control of the Python version. I use Poetry most of the time. For this article, I'll use the default options for poetry.

Don't let the message below scare you, it just need a simple fix.

> mkdir pyside6-sandbox && cd pyside6-sandbox
>
> poetry init -n
> ls
pyproject.toml
> poetry add pyside6

The current project\'s Python requirement (>=3.10,<4.0) is not compatible with some of the required packages Python requirement:
  - pyside6 requires Python <3.12,>=3.7, so it will not be satisfied for Python >=3.12,<4.0

Because no versions of pyside6 match >6.4.1,<7.0.0
 and pyside6 (6.4.1) requires Python <3.12,>=3.7, pyside6 is forbidden.
So, because pyside6-sandbox depends on PySide6 (^6.4.1), version solving failed.

  • Check your dependencies Python requirement: The Python requirement can be specified via the `python` or `markers` properties

    For pyside6, a possible solution would be to set the `python` property to ">=3.10,<3.12"

    https://python-poetry.org/docs/dependency-specification/#python-restricted-dependencies,
    https://python-poetry.org/docs/dependency-specification/#using-environment-markers

To install PySide6, we specify the python version.

> poetry add --python '>=3.10,<3.12' pyside6
Using version ^6.4.1 for PySide6

Updating dependencies
Resolving dependencies... (0.4s)

Writing lock file

Package operations: 4 installs, 0 updates, 0 removals

  • Installing shiboken6 (6.4.1)
  • Installing pyside6-essentials (6.4.1)
  • Installing pyside6-addons (6.4.1)
  • Installing pyside6 (6.4.1)

> poetry shell
Spawning shell within some-where/virtualenvs/pyside6-sandbox-UCbHYWjN-py3.10
> (pyside6-sandbox-py3.10)

DONE!

But wait! There's more!

The pyside6 package included a bunch of tools. Just make sure we are in our virtual environment.

• pyside6-assistant
• pyside6-deploy
• pyside6-designer
• pyside6-genpyi
• pyside6-linguist
• pyside6-lrelease
• pyside6-lupdate
• pyside6-metaobjectdump
• pyside6-project
• pyside6-qml
• pyside6-qmlformat
• pyside6-qmlimportscanner
• pyside6-qmllint
• pyside6-qmlls
• pyside6-qmltyperegistrar
• pyside6-qtpy2cpp
• pyside6-rcc
• pyside6-uic

If you are on Powershell, use this command to see what you get:

> (pyside6-sandbox-py3.10)gcm -Name 'pyside6-*'

To use QtDesigner:

> (pyside6-sandbox-py3.10) pyside6-qtdesigner &  # launch in background with '&'

If you are new to the Qt ecosystem, make sure to checkout:

• pyside6-designer
• pyside6-rcc
• pyside6-uic

Conclusion

I know webapps are gaining a lot of traction for a long while, but writing desktop application is always a fun thing to do for me.

What actually reinspark me to give Qt a look again is this tutorial by freeCodeCamp.org.

video link

Although Qt's documentation is a little bit lacking in the Python side, Qt is a powerful and mature ecosystem for building desktop applications. Definitely worth give it a try!