Qt5 not found by VLC build system

Question

I'm trying to compile VLC on a Ubuntu machine. So after getting all the additional packages required for build, when I run ./configure it says Qt5Core along with a few other Qt related libraries are not found. The problem is that I know that a complete installation of Qt5 and it's libraries are available on my system in the home directory rather than global directory. When building it seems that pkg-config does not check the home directory. How do I inform the actual location of Qt5 installation to the build system?

Note: I have tried downloading Qt from apt sources but that installation was for Qt5.9 rather than the required Qt5.11.

Answer 1

configure needs to fnd the .pc files for Qt modules,
If you check config.log , it might be complaining about that :

configure:xxxx: $PKG_CONFIG --exists --print-errors "Qt5Core >= 5.11.0 Qt5Widgets Qt5Gui Qt5Quick Qt5QuickWidgets Qt5QuickControls2 Qt5Svg"

Package Qt5Quick was not found in the pkg-config search path.
Perhaps you should add the directory containing `Qt5Quick.pc'
to the PKG_CONFIG_PATH environment variable
No package 'Qt5Quick' found
Package Qt5QuickWidgets was not found in the pkg-config search path.
Perhaps you should add the directory containing `Qt5QuickWidgets.pc'
to the PKG_CONFIG_PATH environment variable

There, and to link configure to a specific Qt installation, you have a couple of options , Either export variable QT_LIBS

export QT_LIBS=/path/to/qt/libs/

OR , directly add Qt pkgconfig path containing the .pc files to shell PKG_CONFIG_PATH,

export PKG_CONFIG_PATH=$PKG_CONFIG_PATH:/path/to/qt/libs/pkgconfig/