Development/Tutorials/Desktop File

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Development/Tutorials/Desktop File


Desktop File
Tutorial Series   Basics
Previous   Session Management
What's Next  
Further Reading   the .desktop Free Desktop Spec;

Desktop File

In order for your application to show up in menus and/or to be automatically associated with mime types in file browsers, you need to provide a .desktop file like follows:

[Desktop Entry]
Type=Application
Exec=your-app %u
MimeType=application/x-your-mime-type;
Icon=some-icon
X-DocPath=yourapp/index.html
Terminal=false
Name=Your App
GenericName=Some Generic Name
Comment=Short Description Of Your App
Categories=Qt;KDE;

Take a look at the .desktop Free Desktop Spec to find our more about the key/value pairs above. It's important to pick a good set of Categories, see the spec for a list of valid values.

Your project

In your project you need to take care the .desktop file is distributed to the appropriate place. In case you are working on a qmake based project, add the following to your .pro file:

target.path = /usr/local/bin
desktop.path = /usr/share/applications
desktop.files += your-app.desktop
INSTALLS += target desktop

Note that the bold strings above should be in your project anyway.