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Install Flutter

2 minute read

Now to get the Flutter tools installed.

Follow instructions from https://docs.flutter.dev/get-started/install/linux/android

  • Download the flutter_*.tar.xz archive
  • Unpack the archive into $HOME/.local/bin (creates $HOME/.local/bin/flutter/bin)
    At first I tried putting this at /usr/bin, but that caused invisible errors in coc-flutter as it couldn’t access the path properly to find the Flutter SDK
  • Add the new path as above to $PATH eg in ~/.profile
# ~/.profile
export PATH="$HOME/.local/bin/flutter/bin:$PATH"

For ARM64 architectures the Flutter SDK cannot be found at the above link, nor in the archives. In this case the SDK can be obtained by cloning the main flutter repo, then running a flutter command to trigger a download of dependencies

git clone -b main https://github.com/flutter/flutter.git
./flutter/bin/flutter --version

Agree to more licenses and get Flutter doctor to pass

First, agree to several laughably long licence agreements which Google knows full well that nobody reads.

flutter doctor --android-licenses

Then type Y and Enter for each prompt

Now run flutter doctor. It should pass every test except ‘Android Studio (not installed)’. If so, we’re ready to start building Flutter apps (with Android Studio not installed).

Sample project

You can make a really simple sample project to check that everything’s installed correctly and see how it works.

flutter create sample-project

This will create a sample-project directory with a Flutter app in it, a simple built-in demo of a button which counts up as you tap it.

To run the app:

cd sample_project
flutter run