Setting up Flutter

Setting up Flutter

So my wife and I had made a goal to write a small full stack app for ourselves this year, and after a bunch of deliberation we finally settled on Flutter as our front-end framework. Partly because it was up and coming, but also partly because it already supported Android, iOS, and Web, and lately it supports Windows as well.

Flutter itself is pretty easy to set up; basically download the SDK and drop it wherever you like, and add that to your path.

Once that’s done, running flutter doctor will tell you what you need to install to round out your development environment, which is hugely useful.

Setting up Flutter without Android Studio

But as a Vim/Emacs user, I am much more comfortable with the command line than with an IDE now, and I really didn’t want to have to figure out Android Studio along with Flutter development. Thankfully, it is possible to just get Android Command Line Tools and use this to install everything else (and without having to install the bloated Android Studio). So I did!

This downloaded another .zip file, which I promptly unzipped and dropped next to flutter, and with a bit of fiddling around with environment variables while referring to a guide I finally got it to work with the following folder structure:

Some things to note:

1. We do need to add ANDROID_HOME to environment variables
2. We also need to add the cmdline-tools and platform-tools locations to PATH
3. sdkmanager needs to be run with the --sdk_root= option

An alternative

Out of sheer frustration, I tried installing Android Studio, promptly regretted my decision, and uninstalled it, and discovered that it had installed the latest platform dependencies and tools in %LOCALAPPDATA%\Android\Sdk. Using this, I was able to re-do the installation of the command line tools just for sdkmanager and soon after was able to get going again.

Back to Flutter

And then after running flutter doctor again:

And following the advice, we finally got to an acceptable state

Of course, there are still some errors there, but since I don’t yet intend to develop Windows apps on Flutter, and I didn’t intend to use Android Studio to begin with, this is fine.

Neovim setup

Since I’m using CoC, I just opted for coc-flutter-tools and dart-vim-plugin. This does a surprising amount, if the github page is anything to be believed, but I have VSCode’s plugin as a pretty well-known backup.

I did a quick test drive following the Flutter guide, and in about a minute I had a web app running on my browser. Pretty nifty!

I’ll get to more configuration on Neovim another day, but for now this looks promising for my own development.