Flutter: Introduction and Installation

Flutter is an open-source mobile framework created by Google and introduced in 2017. In the beginning, Flutter was a young framework which has a lot of bugs and errors, but year by year creators of this framework solve bugs and improve it to make development easier and faster. Now Flutter becomes a modern framework to build apps for both Android and IOS platforms. Flutter uses Dart language to create applications. If you are familiar with Javascript, use Dart will not a problem for you. These lessons are for developers who have some experience in Android Development and want to learn new popular framework called Flutter.

So let’s start our journey to Flutter’s world. First of all, you need to download Flutter SDK from the official site and install it. To do it, you should visit https://flutter.dev/docs/get-started/install and select an operating system which is on your computer.

Select your operating system and follow the instructions

Don’t forget to update your PATH variable

For Windows:

• From the Start search bar, type ‘env’ and select Edit environment variables for your account.
• Under User variables check if there is an entry called Path:
• If the entry does exist, append the full path to flutter\bin using ; as a separator from existing values.
• If the entry does not exist, create a new user variable named Path with the full path to flutter\bin as its value

For OSX:

export PATH="$PATH:`pwd`/flutter/bin"

After this, open terminal run flutter doctor, you should see something like this:

[-] Android toolchain - develop for Android devices
    • Android SDK at /Users/obiwan/Library/Android/sdk
    ✗ Android SDK is missing command line tools; download from https://goo.gl/XxQghQ
    • Try re-installing or updating your Android SDK,
      visit https://flutter.dev/setup/#android-setup for detailed instructions.

If you didn’t see it, it means that you didn’t update PATH variables correctly and didn’t install flutter correctly. If everything seems ok, so let’s continue.

Configuring IDE

For most new developers I recommend to use Android Studio because it is the official IDE for Android Development from Google, and also it makes the development process easier and makes many things in one click. But for developers who have some experience in Android Development, I recommend using Visual Studio Code because it is more lightweight than Android Studio, and for Flutter development pretty enough. You can download Visual Studio Code from https://code.visualstudio.com/

So for Android Studio firstly you should download plugins.

To make it open Android Studio>Preferences>Plugins

Type ‘flutter’ in the search area:

Click to install. You should see an alert than Dart plugin is also should be installed, click yes and install both plugins. That’s it

In Visual Studio code open Extensions(Ctrl+Shift+X) and type “flutter”

Click Install. Likely to Android Studio Visual Studio Code also ask you to install dart plugin also. If it is not, you should install it manually.

In the next articles, we will learn to create a flutter app and at the end, we’ll create a real news app using all features of Flutter Framework.

Flutter. Project Structure. Create a simple app

Have a good day!

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