After much pain and agony, I have finally figured out how to build WebKitQt and QtLauncher (the demo app) on Mac OS X.

It's probably not supposed to be this hard, but there's a dearth of info on how to do this (I suspect because the guys at Trolltech are busy trying to get Qt 4.3 out the door).

In any case, I wanted to use WebKit in a spidering app I'm working on using Qt 4.3 and C++. Even though I am a 100% Mac-based developer these days, I still want my apps to be cross-platform, so I opt for Qt over Cocoa/Objective-C. This meant that I had to follow the Apple/XCode dylib rules as well as install a few libraries that weren't on my system by default.

1 - Using fink, I installed flex and bison (separate installs).
2 - Then I had to specify QTDIR environment variable (QTDIR=/usr/local/Trolltech/Qt-4.3.0beta) (then export QTDIR)
3 - add QTDIR to your PATH environment variable (PATH=$PATH:$QTDIR/bin) (then export PATH)
4 - make sure you have NOT specified a QMAKESPEC in your bash profile (so echo $QMAKESPEC should not return anything)
5 - grab the latest WebKit source using SVN (see webkit.org for instructions)
6 - run ./WebKit/WebKitTools/Scripts/build-webkit

This should make the build script compile using qmake.

7 - copy the dylibs from /WebKit/WebKitBuild/Release/lib to /usr/lib

QtLauncher should now run (located in /WebKit/WebKitBuild/Release/WebKitQt/QtLauncher).

In order to compile/edit this in xcode...

8 - in a terminal window - cd into /WebKit/WebKitQt/QtLauncher/
9 - run the following"qmake -spec macx-xcode"

You should now see QtLauncher.xcodeproj in that directory.

You may have to manually delete and re-add some of the Qt libraries in XCode, as well as adding the QtNetwork.framework, since I don't think it's added by default.

I'm sure I missed some of the details (since I typed this rather quickly), but this captures many of the small steps that tripped me up along the way.