Flutter Journey 001 — Flutter Setup
What is Flutter?
Flutter is an open-source UI toolkit developed by Google for building applications for mobile, web, and desktop from a single codebase. It allows developers to create high-quality, visually appealing, and performant user interfaces using a single programming language, Dart.
Flutter follows a reactive and declarative programming model, where the UI is built using a tree of widgets that update automatically when the underlying data changes. Flutter also comes with a hot-reloading feature, which allows you to see the changes you make in your code in real-time without needing to restart the app.
One of the key advantages of Flutter is its performance. Flutter apps are compiled directly to native code, which allows them to achieve near-native performance, making them fast and smooth even on lower-end devices.
Flutter has a large and active community of developers, which means you can find plenty of resources, tutorials, and libraries to help you build your app. Flutter is also backed by Google, which provides regular updates and support, making it a robust and reliable framework for app development.
Instructions
- It's better to have no white space in your pc name. Like “abc_def” or “abcdef ”is better than “abc def”. Beginners may face a lot of issues in setting up the flutter environment if there is a white space in pc name.
- In this story, we are setting up the flutter environment for the windows.
- You can follow the link to set up the flutter environment for other platforms.
Let’s Get Started
Download Flutter SDK
Download Flutter SDK from the link
Click on the button and download the zip file.
You can download and extract the zip file wherever you want but my recommendation is to create a new folder name “src” in C: drive on your pc and unzip the Flutter SDK.
Add Flutter SDK path in environment variables
Open the environment variables control panel by searching it in the Windows search bar. Click on the “Environment Variables” button.
A new window will open. Select the “Path” variable row and click on the first “edit” button.
Click on the “new” button and add the Flutter SDK bin folder path. The end result should look like this.
Click “OK” and close all windows by pressing the “OK” button.
Java JDK and Android Studio Installation
Download the Java JDK from the link. and Install the Java JDK.
Add the Java JDK bin folder path in the environment variable control panel as mentioned above in the “Add Flutter SDK path in environment variables”.
Download and install the Android Studio from the link.
Open the Android Studio. Click on the plugin options. Search the Flutter and install the Flutter plugin. Then search dart package and install it. I have already installed the Flutter and Dart plugins in the Android studio.
You can also use VS Code. It’s your call which IDE you prefer.
Download and install the VS Code from the link.
Click on the extension option. Search and install the Flutter and Dart extensions.
Wow, You have done it. You are ready to build your first Flutter App.
