PyQt5: How to install/run Qt Designer
Now what? There are a lot of .pyd files, some .dll’s, too, but nothing executable (well, except a QtWebEngineProcess.exe in . \site-packages\PyQt5\Qt\bin , but that doesn’t sound like what I’m looking for.
If you’re still struggling, you may also try my standalone installer for Qt Designer. It’s only 40 MB and creates a simple «Qt Designer» entry in the Start menu.
As of December 2018, with Python 3.6 and PyQt5 under Windows 7, QT designer car be installed simply with pip install pyqt5-tools . An executable is then available in C:\Program Files\Python36\Lib\site-packages\pyqt5_tools
Just installed Python on Windows 11 laptop, and folder seems to have moved to \Lib\site-packages\qt5_applications\Qt\bin in virtual environment folder.
20 Answers 20
I struggled with this as well. The pyqt5-tools approach is cumbersome so I created a standalone installer for Qt Designer. It’s only 40 MB. Maybe you will find it useful!
If you are working in python virtual environment, in the command window
The Qt designer is not installed with the pip installation.
You can either download the full download from sourceforge (probably won’t be the last pyqt release, and might be buggy on presence of another installation, like yours) or install it with another (unofficial) pypi package — pyqt5-tools ( pip install pyqt5-tools ), then run the designer from the following subpath of your python directory:
. \Python36\Lib\site-packages\qt5_applications\Qt\bin\designer.exe . \Python36\Lib\site-packages\pyqt5-tools\designer\designer.exe Thank you! pip install pyqt5-tools gave me a No matching distribution found , though, so I’ll try sourceforge (kind of defeats the purpose of having pip, but . ).
Yeah, browse the installations manually under the «files» tab (near «summary», under the title with the logo), then navigate to «PyQt5».
@User1291. The current pyqt5-tools is for PyQt-5.7 not PyQt-5.7.1, so it’s not compatible. However, you should be able to open the pyqt5-tools wheel like a zip file and extract the contents to a suitable location. You can then try running the designer.exe file in the pyqt5-tools/designer folder.
The latest PyQt5 wheels (which can be installed via pip) only contain what’s necessary for running applications, and don’t include the dev tools. This applies to PyQt versions 5.7 and later. For PyQt versions 5.6 and earlier, there are binary packages for Windows that also include the dev tools, and these are still available at sourceforge. The maintainer of PyQt does not plan on making any further releases of such binary packages, though — only the runtime wheels will now be made available, and there will be no official wheels for the dev tools.
In light of this, someone has created an unofficial pyqt5-tools wheel (for Windows only). This appears to be in it’s early stages, though, and so may not keep up with recent PyQt5 releases. This means that it may not always be possible to install it via pip. If that is the case, as a work-around, the wheel files can be treated as zip files and the contents extracted to a suitable location. This should then allow you to run the designer.exe file that is in the pyqt5-tools folder.
Finally, note that you will also see some zip and tar.gz files at sourceforge for PyQt5. These only contain the source code, though, so will be no use to you unless you intend to compile PyQt5 yourself. And just to be clear: compiling from source still would not give you all the Qt dev tools. If you go down that route, you would need to install the whole Qt development kit separately as well (which would then get you the dev tools).
pyqt5-tools-wheel works from pip . After that, just start designer.exe from Python\Scripts folder. Thanks!
Then restart the cmd, just type «designer» and press enter.
If you cannot see the Designer , just look into this path «Lib\site-packages\qt5_applications\Qt\bin» for designer.exe and run it.
Thank you very much, I recently installed pyqt6-tools and was confused about this. This answer is perfect for me. IF you have already installed the tools and are unable to locate the designer then try this step. for QT6 look for Python39\Lib\site-packages\qt6_applications\Qt\bin and you will find the designer.exe
PyQt5 works after pip install PyQt5Designer
This helped with Python 3.9 under Windows. Thanks. That got me QtDesigner. . To get pyuic5 also going (to generate Python output) I had to also install pyuic5-tool with pip.
You can also install Qt Designer the following way:
- Install latest Qt (I’m using 5.8) from Qt main site
- Make sure you include «Qt 5.8 MinGW» component
- Qt Designer will be installed in C:\Qt\5.8\mingw53_32\bin\designer.exe
- Note that the executable is named «designer.exe»
working in python 3.7.4
wont work in python 3.8.0
For anyone stumbling across this post in 2021+ and finding the answers outdated: QT Designer is now in the qt5-applications package, under Qt\bin\ . On Windows this means the default path, for CPython 3.9 using the Python.org installer, is %APPDATA%\Python\Python39\site-packages\qt5_applications\Qt\bin\designer.exe .
I wish there was a way to move posts to the top when the old ones are out of date. May 2022, Visual Studio Code — this is exactly where designer.exe now sits.
Download the module using pip :
pip install PyQt5Designer Then, for anaconda users, open:
C:\ProgramData\AnacondaX\Lib\site-packages\QtDesigner\designer.exe C:\Program Files\PythonXX\Lib\site-packages\QtDesigner\designer.exe C:\Program Files (x86)\PythonXX\Lib\site-packages\QtDesigner\designer.exe For Qt Designer 6 this worked for me thanks for that protip from @Bhaskar
End up with nice working lightweight Qt Designer 6.0.1 version
@ pip install pyqt6-tools Collecting pyqt6-tools Using cached pyqt6_tools-6.1.0.3.2-py3-none-any.whl (29 kB) Collecting pyqt6-plugins=6.1.0.2.2 Downloading pyqt6_plugins-6.1.0.2.2-cp39-cp39-manylinux2014_x86_64.whl (77 kB) |████████████████████████████████| 77 kB 492 kB/s Collecting python-dotenv Using cached python_dotenv-0.19.2-py2.py3-none-any.whl (17 kB) Collecting pyqt6==6.1.0 Downloading PyQt6-6.1.0-cp36.cp37.cp38.cp39-abi3-manylinux_2_28_x86_64.whl (6.8 MB) |████████████████████████████████| 6.8 MB 1.0 MB/s Requirement already satisfied: click in ./.pyenv/versions/3.9.6/lib/python3.9/site-packages (from pyqt6-tools) (8.0.1) Collecting PyQt6-sip=13.1 Downloading PyQt6_sip-13.2.0-cp39-cp39-manylinux1_x86_64.whl (307 kB) |████████████████████████████████| 307 kB 898 kB/s Collecting PyQt6-Qt6>=6.1.0 Using cached PyQt6_Qt6-6.2.2-py3-none-manylinux_2_28_x86_64.whl (50.0 MB) Collecting qt6-tools=6.1.0.1.2 Downloading qt6_tools-6.1.0.1.2-py3-none-any.whl (13 kB) Collecting click Downloading click-7.1.2-py2.py3-none-any.whl (82 kB) |████████████████████████████████| 82 kB 381 kB/s Collecting qt6-applications=6.1.0.2.2 Downloading qt6_applications-6.1.0.2.2-py3-none-manylinux2014_x86_64.whl (80.5 MB) |████████████████████████████████| 80.5 MB 245 kB/s Installing collected packages: qt6-applications, PyQt6-sip, PyQt6-Qt6, click, qt6-tools, pyqt6, python-dotenv, pyqt6-plugins, pyqt6-tools Attempting uninstall: click Found existing installation: click 8.0.1 Uninstalling click-8.0.1: Successfully uninstalled click-8.0.1 Successfully installed PyQt6-Qt6-6.2.2 PyQt6-sip-13.2.0 click-7.1.2 pyqt6-6.1.0 pyqt6-plugins-6.1.0.2.2 pyqt6-tools-6.1.0.3.2 python-dotenv-0.19.2 qt6-applications-6.1.0.2.2 qt6-tools-6.1.0.1.2