Windows install

Contents

System requirements
Get the Flutter SDK
- Update your path
- Run flutter doctor
Android setup
Windows setup
- Additional Windows requirements
- Enable desktop support
Web setup
Next step

System requirements

To install and run Flutter, your development environment must meet these minimum requirements:

Operating Systems: Windows 7 SP1 or later (64-bit), x86-64 based.
Disk Space: 1.64 GB (does not include disk space for IDE/tools).
Tools: Flutter depends on these tools being available in your environment.
- Windows PowerShell 5.0 or newer (this is pre-installed with Windows 10)
- Git for Windows 2.x, with the Use Git from the Windows Command Prompt option.
  
  If Git for Windows is already installed, make sure you can run git commands from the command prompt or PowerShell.

Get the Flutter SDK

Download the following installation bundle to get the latest stable release of the Flutter SDK:

(loading…)

For other release channels, and older builds, see the SDK releases page.
Extract the zip file and place the contained flutter in the desired installation location for the Flutter SDK (for example, C:\Users\<your-user-name>\Documents).

If you don’t want to install a fixed version of the installation bundle, you can skip steps 1 and 2. Instead, get the source code from the Flutter repo on GitHub, and change branches or tags as needed. For example:

C:\src>git clone https://github.com/flutter/flutter.git -b stable

You are now ready to run Flutter commands in the Flutter Console.

Update your path

If you wish to run Flutter commands in the regular Windows console, take these steps to add Flutter to the PATH environment variable:

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

You have to close and reopen any existing console windows for these changes to take effect.

Note: As of Flutter’s 1.19.0 dev release, the Flutter SDK contains the dart command alongside the flutter command so that you can more easily run Dart command-line programs. Downloading the Flutter SDK also downloads the compatible version of Dart, but if you’ve downloaded the Dart SDK separately, make sure that the Flutter version of dart is first in your path, as the two versions might not be compatible. The following command tells you whether the flutter and dart commands originate from the same bin directory and are therefore compatible.

  C:\>where flutter dart
  C:\path-to-flutter-sdk\bin\flutter
  C:\path-to-flutter-sdk\bin\flutter.bat
  C:\path-to-dart-sdk\bin\dart.exe        :: this should go after `C:\path-to-flutter-sdk\bin\` commands
  C:\path-to-flutter-sdk\bin\dart
  C:\path-to-flutter-sdk\bin\dart.bat

As shown above, the command dart from the Flutter SDK doesn’t come first. Update your path to use commands from C:\path-to-flutter-sdk\bin\ before commands from C:\path-to-dart-sdk\bin\ (in this case). After restarting your shell for the change to take effect, running the where command again should show that the flutter and dart commands from the same directory now come first.

  C:\>where flutter dart
  C:\dev\src\flutter\bin\flutter
  C:\dev\src\flutter\bin\flutter.bat
  C:\dev\src\flutter\bin\dart
  C:\dev\src\flutter\bin\dart.bat
  C:\dev\src\dart-sdk\bin\dart.exe

However, if you are using PowerShell, in it where is an alias of Where-Object command, so you need to use where.exe instead.

  PS C:\> where.exe flutter dart

To learn more about the dart command, run dart -h from the command line, or see the dart tool page.

Run `flutter doctor`

From a console window that has the Flutter directory in the path (see above), run the following command to see if there are any platform dependencies you need to complete the setup:

C:\src\flutter>flutter doctor

This command checks your environment and displays a report of the status of your Flutter installation. Check the output carefully for other software you might need to install or further tasks to perform (shown in bold text).

For example:

[-] Android toolchain - develop for Android devices
    • Android SDK at D:\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.

The following sections describe how to perform these tasks and finish the setup process. Once you have installed any missing dependencies, you can run the flutter doctor command again to verify that you’ve set everything up correctly.

Warning: The Flutter tool may occasionally download resources from Google servers. By downloading or using the Flutter SDK you agree to the Google Terms of Service.

For example, when installed from GitHub (as opposed to from a prepackaged archive), the Flutter tool will download the Dart SDK from Google servers immediately when first run, as it is used to execute the flutter tool itself. This will also occur when Flutter is upgraded (e.g. by running the flutter upgrade command).

The flutter tool uses Google Analytics to report feature usage statistics and send crash reports. This data is used to help improve Flutter tools over time.

Flutter tool analytics are not sent on the very first run. To disable reporting, run flutter config --no-analytics. To display the current setting, use flutter config. If you opt out of analytics, an opt-out event is sent, and then no further information is sent by the Flutter tool.

Dart tools may also send usage metrics and crash reports to Google. To control the submission of these metrics, use the following options on the dart tool:

--enable-analytics: Enables anonymous analytics.
--disable-analytics: Disables anonymous analytics.

The Google Privacy Policy describes how data is handled by these services.

Android setup

Install Android Studio

Download and install Android Studio.
Start Android Studio, and go through the ‘Android Studio Setup Wizard’. This installs the latest Android SDK, Android SDK Command-line Tools, and Android SDK Build-Tools, which are required by Flutter when developing for Android.
Run flutter doctor to confirm that Flutter has located your installation of Android Studio. If Flutter cannot locate it, run flutter config --android-studio-dir <directory> to set the directory that Android Studio is installed to.

Set up your Android device

To prepare to run and test your Flutter app on an Android device, you need an Android device running Android 4.1 (API level 16) or higher.

Enable Developer options and USB debugging on your device. Detailed instructions are available in the Android documentation.
Windows-only: Install the Google USB Driver.
Using a USB cable, plug your phone into your computer. If prompted on your device, authorize your computer to access your device.
In the terminal, run the flutter devices command to verify that Flutter recognizes your connected Android device. By default, Flutter uses the version of the Android SDK where your adb tool is based. If you want Flutter to use a different installation of the Android SDK, you must set the ANDROID_SDK_ROOT environment variable to that installation directory.

Set up the Android emulator

To prepare to run and test your Flutter app on the Android emulator, follow these steps:

Enable VM acceleration on your machine.
Launch Android Studio, click the AVD Manager icon, and select Create Virtual Device…
- In older versions of Android Studio, you should instead launch Android Studio > Tools > Android > AVD Manager and select Create Virtual Device…. (The Android submenu is only present when inside an Android project.)
- If you do not have a project open, you can choose Configure > AVD Manager and select Create Virtual Device…
Choose a device definition and select Next.
Select one or more system images for the Android versions you want to emulate, and select Next. An x86 or x86_64 image is recommended.
Under Emulated Performance, select Hardware - GLES 2.0 to enable hardware acceleration.
Verify the AVD configuration is correct, and select Finish.

For details on the above steps, see Managing AVDs.
In Android Virtual Device Manager, click Run in the toolbar. The emulator starts up and displays the default canvas for your selected OS version and device.

Agree to Android Licenses

Before you can use Flutter, you must agree to the licenses of the Android SDK platform. This step should be done after you have installed the tools listed above.

Make sure that you have a version of Java 8 installed and that your JAVA_HOME environment variable is set to the JDK’s folder.

Android Studio versions 2.2 and higher come with a JDK, so this should already be done.
Open an elevated console window and run the following command to begin signing licenses.
```
$ flutter doctor --android-licenses
```
Review the terms of each license carefully before agreeing to them.
Once you are done agreeing with licenses, run flutter doctor again to confirm that you are ready to use Flutter.

Windows setup

Additional Windows requirements

For Windows desktop development, you need the following in addition to the Flutter SDK:

Visual Studio 2019 (not to be confused with Visual Studio Code). For Win32 you need the “Desktop development with C++” workload installed, including all of its default components. For UWP you need the “Universal Windows Platform development” workload installed, with the optional UWP C++ tools.

Enable desktop support

At the command line, perform the following command to enable Win32 desktop support:

$ flutter config --enable-windows-desktop

For Windows UWP desktop support perform the following commands to switch to the dev channel, upgrade Flutter, and enable UWP.

$ flutter channel dev
$ flutter upgrade
$ flutter config --enable-windows-uwp-desktop

For more information, see Desktop support for Flutter

Web setup

Flutter has support for building web applications in the stable channel. Any app created in Flutter 2 automatically builds for the web. To add web support to an existing app, follow the instructions on Building a web application with Flutter when you’ve completed the setup above.

Next step

Set up your preferred editor.