This section describes the differences between Nix expressions for Qt libraries and applications and Nix expressions for other C++ software. Some knowledge of the latter is assumed. There are primarily two problems which the Qt infrastructure is designed to address: ensuring consistent versioning of all dependencies and finding dependencies at runtime. { mkDerivation, lib, qtbase }: mkDerivation { pname = "myapp"; version = "1.0"; buildInputs = [ qtbase ]; } Import mkDerivation and Qt (such as qtbase modules directly. Do not import Qt package sets; the Qt versions of dependencies may not be coherent, causing build and runtime failures. Use mkDerivation instead of stdenv.mkDerivation. mkDerivation is a wrapper around stdenv.mkDerivation which applies some Qt-specific settings. This deriver accepts the same arguments as stdenv.mkDerivation; refer to for details. To use another deriver instead of stdenv.mkDerivation, use mkDerivationWith: mkDerivationWith myDeriver { # ... } If you cannot use mkDerivationWith, please refer to . mkDerivation accepts the same arguments as stdenv.mkDerivation, such as buildInputs. Qt applications need to be wrapped to find runtime dependencies. If you cannot use mkDerivation or mkDerivationWith above, include wrapQtAppsHook in nativeBuildInputs: stdenv.mkDerivation { # ... nativeBuildInputs = [ wrapQtAppsHook ]; } Entries added to qtWrapperArgs are used to modify the wrappers created by wrapQtAppsHook. The entries are passed as arguments to . mkDerivation { # ... qtWrapperArgs = [ ''--prefix PATH : /path/to/bin'' ]; } Set dontWrapQtApps to stop applications from being wrapped automatically. It is required to wrap applications manually with wrapQtApp, using the syntax of : mkDerivation { # ... dontWrapQtApps = true; preFixup = '' wrapQtApp "$out/bin/myapp" --prefix PATH : /path/to/bin ''; } wrapQtAppsHook ignores files that are non-ELF executables. This means that scripts won't be automatically wrapped so you'll need to manually wrap them as previously mentioned. An example of when you'd always need to do this is with Python applications that use PyQT. Libraries are built with every available version of Qt. Use the meta.broken attribute to disable the package for unsupported Qt versions: mkDerivation { # ... # Disable this library with Qt < 5.9.0 meta.broken = builtins.compareVersions qtbase.version "5.9.0" < 0; } Add a Qt library to all-packages.nix by adding it to the collection inside mkLibsForQt5. This ensures that the library is built with every available version of Qt as needed. { # ... mkLibsForQt5 = self: with self; { # ... mylib = callPackage ../path/to/mylib {}; }; # ... } Add a Qt application to all-packages.nix using libsForQt5.callPackage instead of the usual callPackage. The former ensures that all dependencies are built with the same version of Qt. { # ... myapp = libsForQt5.callPackage ../path/to/myapp/ {}; # ... }