Setting up

Alright we have come to maybe the most complex part of learning any development framework, setting everything up. Compared to other frameworks setting up Flutter is way easier since it is distributed as a single archive. Extract it somewhere set the path correctly and you are golden.

Flutter Distribution

Flutter is distributed as a standalone distribution which self manages itself. It contains the flutter binary which handles most of the house keeping tasks.

Platform Setup

Flutter is a cross platform development framework, so we need to install the platform for it to work. Flutter supports developing for the web, desktop and mobile. Web and Desktop has not reached stability so this guide would focus more on developing for iOS and Android.

Flutter contains a platform shell and then your cross platform code. To compile the shell we need to setup the build tool-chain for the platform which we are developing. This means we need to setup XCode for iOS and android-studio and associated tools for Android.

Setup Flutter

Follow the instructions at https://flutter.dev/docs/get-started/install and set up flutter for your platform and OS.

Flutter Binary

You will mostly be interacting with flutter through the flutter binary. It's the main bread and butter of Flutter.

It supports a host of commands of which these are the most common ones.

• flutter : calls the flutter binary and displays list of options

• flutter create <app-name> : creates a new empty app in the given directory

• flutter run : runs the current App in an emulator or connected physical device.

• flutter run --release : runs the release variant

• flutter build : build the Flutter app and generates the release binaries for distribution.

• flutter upgrade : upgrades your global flutter installation.

Device or Emulator

It's no good writing code in an empty editor what's exciting is seeing it run. To run Flutter Apps we need either and emulator or an actual physical device. A physical device is recommended during final testing so we can test the actual experience the user will have. Emulators suffice for testing but keep in mind that some tasks like location and camera access can only be tested on an actual device.

iOS Simulator set up : https://flutter.dev/docs/get-started/install/macos#set-up-the-ios-simulator

Android Emulator : https://flutter.dev/docs/get-started/install/macos#set-up-the-android-emulator

IDE

One of the best things about Flutter is the associated tooling that comes with it. The team has done a stellar job of creating awesome plugins that provide features such as code completion, boilerplate generation, debugging and auto format. It is highly recommended that you use either VSCode or Android Studio as they are the only ones who are officially supported.

If you don't have a preference I would recommend that you go with VSCode as it contains about the same functionality as Android Studio for Flutter development with about 1/10 of the resource usage.

VSCode instructions : https://flutter.dev/docs/get-started/editor?tab=vscode

Android Studio : https://flutter.dev/docs/get-started/editor?tab=androidstudio