Flutter hot-reload in Gitpod

Challenge accepted ;)

In short, Gitpod is a workspace in a container serving its UI to a browser. For more details, see Sven Efftinge’s post on how Gitpod works.

Using containers is a clean solution most of the time, but in terms of native app development, not so much, because the container isolation makes it hard for emulators to use accelerators.

Set up a “half device” for testing

If connecting a device to Gitpod is not possible (correct me if some ADB magicians find a way), and running an iOS or Android emulator in a container is not possible, then what device can we possibly use?

A SWAG: since Flutter is a cross-platform framework, maybe we can target the web (Chrome).

Let’s give it a try. First, we will need to switch our Flutter to master channel and enable the web in the configuration:

As we can see in the output (under “Chrome” section and “Connected device section”), Chrome exists, not the full version, but a headless server (meaning no…