Run the Qt application as administrator on Windows

Running your application with administrator privileges does not have a whole lot to do with Qt. There are two approaches.

The "simple" one is to manually set your application to run with administrator privileges. You can do so by right-clicking on the executable. Then on the "Compatibilty" tab, you can choose to "Run this application as an administrator" under "Privilege level".

However, if you automatically want to achieve the same, you will have to embed a manifest into your application. What you're looking for is to set the requestedExecutionLevel to requireAdministrator. A bit more information can be found on MSDN or in this Wikipedia entry on UAC.

For your application as built in Qt Creator, it means you will need to embed the manifest by including a reference to it in a Resource (.rc) file. This resource file can then be added to your .pro file by specifying RC_FILE = myapp.rc. An informative blog post on this very issue is this one, as well as this post on the QtCentre forum.

A very simple solution for this, if you're using MSVC toolkit, is to add the following into the project file:

QMAKE_LFLAGS_WINDOWS += "/MANIFESTUAC:\"level='requireAdministrator' uiAccess='false'\""

I am using Qt 5.12 msvc2017.

I've found this to be quite neat, as from what I see in generated Makefile, Qt is already adding some manifest related link flags, and this approach wouldn't interfere with already embedding manifest, as manually adding manifest from existing file.

Other manifest link options can be easily added. You can read the docs for VS compiler, and/or you can check what flags/options Visual Studio IDE has to offer in Project properties/Linker/Manifest File and then check Command Line section of the Linker to see how it adds them.

Not sure how would this be done in gcc or clang builds, it would probably require solutions provided by @H Aßdøµ, and @Bart.