Best Way to Learn Flutter (2020 Step-by-Step Guide) : Episode 1

 Flutter has been emerging as a great option for developing cross-platform mobile apps since Google announced the first stable version at Flutter Live. But where to start? In this post, we will cover the step-by-step guide to get started with Flutter.

What is Flutter

Simply put, Flutter is a framework which allows developers to create cross-platform apps using a single programming language. Flutter can be considered an alternative to the React Native framework. The Flutter framework is being developed at Google but it's open to all external contributors. Flutter has been around for a long time, but it started getting more attention when Google announced the release preview of Flutter. At Flutter Live on 4 December 2018, with loads of new features. After this, the popularity of Flutter apps grew drastically.

Flutter uses the Dart programming language which was introduced by Google in 2011 and is rarely used by developers. Dart syntax is easy to understand as it supports most of the object-oriented concepts. Flutter apps are a collection of widgets, everything in the Flutter is a widget. Basically, this information is enough for anyone to get their hands dirty with Flutter. To learn more about the technical details of Flutter, refer to the technical overview in the official cookbook.

Installing Software

In order to get started with Flutter, we have to install some software on your local machine. You can either use macOS, Windows or Linux to get started with Flutter, however, macOS has the benefit of getting both the iOS and Android environment on the same machine. We will assume that you are using macOS for Flutter development, but you can always follow the similar instructions for Windows and Linux as well.

Install Flutter

Flutter installation needs some command line tools installed on macOS. Most of the tools come with Xcode. You can download Flutter SDK either from Github or the official download page. Once we have the Flutter SDK, we have to add it into the PATH so that we can access Flutter binary globally. The first step is to download Flutter SDK and unzip it to a suitable location on our disk. We can do this by using the following command:

$ cd ~/development
$ unzip ~/Downloads/flutter_macos_v1.5.4-hotfix.2-stable.zip

$ unzip flutter_macos_v0.7.3-beta.zip

Now that we have downloaded the Flutter SDK, we need to add Flutter to our $PATH so that we can access Flutter globally. This varies from shell to shell, bash, we can simply run this command:

$ export PATH=[PATH_TO_FLUTTER__DIRECTORY]/flutter/bin:$PATH

You can find the instructions to update the Flutter PATH here. Once you set up the PATH, you should then be able to confirm installation by running:

$ flutter --help

This command will print all available commands of Flutter.

Install Dart (Optional)

Once Flutter is installed, you may also want to install Dart. Usually, some Dart libraries come with Flutter itself, but if you need more Dart developer tools then you probably need to install Dart as well. This is optional but good to have. You need to install Homebrew in order to get Dart on your machine. You can install Homebrew by using the following command:

$ /usr/bin/ruby -e "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/master/install)"

This will take some time, but once the installation is complete, you should be able to install any package using Homebrew. Let's install Dart by using following commands:

$ brew tap dart-lang/dart

$ brew install dart

You will now have Dart installed on your local machine.

Install Xcode

You can develop both iOS and Android apps with Flutter. If you are developing an iOS app with Flutter, you need to install Xcode on your macOS. You can not install on other platforms like Windows or Linux. On macOS, it's very easy to install Xcode, you simply need to use your Apple developer account and download it from the App Store. Xcode is a large piece of software so it will take some time to download. Once you have Xcode installed, you will get most of the command line tools along with Xcode. We might need to configure the Xcode command line tools to use the newly-installed version of Xcode by using the command:

$ sudo xcode-select --switch /Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/Developer

Once the command line tools install, you need to agree on the Xcode terms and conditions. You can do so by opening Xcode and clicking on the Agree button or by confirming or running sudo xcodebuild - license from the command line.

With Xcode, you'll be able to run Flutter apps on an iOS device or on the simulator. The complete guide for the iOS setup is available in the Flutter documentation, here.

Install Android SDK Studio

If you are developing apps for Android, you also need to complete Android setup. If you download and install Android Studio then most of the basic setup is covered. Once you start Android Studio, go through the ‘Android Studio Setup Wizard’. This installs the latest Android SDK, Android SDK Platform-Tools and Android SDK Build-Tools, which are required by Flutter when developing for Android. You can also set up a device or emulator for the Android development as mentioned in the Flutter documentation, here.

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