A newbie’s instructions to Flutter installation on Windows 10.
Being a beginner to Flutter and to mobile app development as a whole, I hopped on over to the official Flutter website (https://flutter.dev/). Clicking on the “Get Started” button on the top right corner would take you to the docs. After selecting the OS for installation, the guide opens up, specifying the system requirements, download options for Flutter SDK followed by steps for installation. Although the docs are pretty sufficient and straightforward, I faced a couple of hiccups down the road to installation of both Flutter and Android Studio, the later being required to run and test your Android app. Therefore, the thought occurred to me, to provide a concise yet comprehensive guide to installation of Flutter and the accompanying tools required to begin Android App Development.
Installation checklist
There are a couple of prerequisites, that Flutter installation demands, which would be out of scope for this article. The installation requires to have Windows PowerShell 5.0 or newer (pre-installed on Windows 10) and Git for Windows 2.x, with the Use Git from the Windows Command Prompt option selected. Additionally, the docs also mention that it is essential to have a version of Java 8 installed on your machine, the JAVA_HOME variable added to the system variables and its value set to the directory where the jdk folder is located. I would recommend installing the aforementioned softwares first.
Apart from the above two tools, the article would be covering the following tools:
- Flutter SDK
- Android Studio
Installing Flutter SDK
We can begin with downloading the Flutter SDK by clicking on the download button followed by carrying out an unzip of the downloaded file.
The unzipped file should be saved at a directory other than C:\Program Files\, which might demand administrative permissions. There is also an option to clone the repository from GitHub by running the git clone command in the preferred directory
Post extraction of the source files, the next step is to add the path to Flutter code to the environment variables in order to access the “flutter” command in directories other than the source directory. To do this search for Edit the system environment variables in the search bar. Click on the Environment Variables button under the System Properties tab. On to the Path variable add another entry directed to “flutter\bin”.
Now that the flutter command is accessible in all directories, its time to run the flutter doctor, which is a tool that determines the status of your flutter installation. Run the command flutter doctor inside any directory using PowerShell/ Git Bash/ Command prompt and analyze the resulting report for missing installations and other issues.
Installing Android Studio
Android Studio can be downloaded from https://developer.android.com/studio. Going through the Android Studio Setup wizard, make sure that the installation includes Android SDK, Android SDK Command-line Tools, and Android SDK Build-Tools which are essential for development on Flutter. After installation completes, run the flutter doctor command to ensure Flutter has detected the installed Android Studio. If not, a warning would appear, stating that flutter was unable to detect Android Studio. In that case, run the following command:
During Android Studio installation, it would be required to install Intel HAXM(Intel Hardware Accelerated Execution Manager), which is essential to run Android Emulator and chances are that the installation for the same would fail.
However, this would not hinder in Android Studio installation itself. The reason behind failure of installation for Intel HAXM is the virtualization functionality being disabled by default. To enable the same, reboot the system and start it in BIOS mode. Switch onto the system configuration tab to enable virtualization. This process varies from system to system, depending upon the make of the PC. Once virtualization has been enabled, Intel HAXM can either be downloaded from their Official GitHub repository(https://github.com/intel/haxm) or the same can be installed within Android Studio by selecting Tools > SDK Manager > SDK Tools and select Intel X86 Emulator Accelerator (HAXM) and click on apply and install.
Additionally, on running flutter doctor, a warning would appear stating to accept licenses. To do so run the following command and accept the licenses:
Conclusion
After the installation of all the required tools, run flutter doctor to confirm the installation completed successfully. For creating a new Flutter App, use the following command:
Also note that the App name, if it contains more than one word, should be written using an underscore and not space. Feel free to reach out in the comments if you face any issues regarding installation and I’d be more than happy to help. Happy Fluttering!
