Flutter development series Part 2 – Setting up the environment

This is the second post of the Flutter development series. In this post, we will be setting up the environment for building our flutter application. 

A new episode will be published fortnightly-ish. The currently and eventually final version of the app can be found in Github.

Flutter is Google’s UI toolkit which you can build native mobile, web and even desktop applications with only one codebase. 

The language used by Flutter is Dart. It’s a modern language with lots of features and backed by Google. 

Installing Flutter

First thing we are going to need is the Flutter SDK. The official website has really good documentation around installing the sdk in different platforms. There is no point in repeating everything. Follow the steps here:

http://flutter.dev/docs/get-started/install

Choosing and setting up IDE

We have multiple choices when it comes to which IDE to use;

• Android Studio
• IntelliJ
• Visual Studio Code

Same thing applies here, there is really good documentation on the official website on how to install and setup each one of them.

http://flutter.dev/docs/get-started/editor?tab=androidstudio

Interestingly, even though I’m an Android Developer and I’m used to Android Studio, I actually use Visual Studio Code for flutter development. It seems to be a bit lighter and it doesn’t drain my laptop battery as fast as Android Studio.

Next steps

That’s it, really. If you followed the steps on the links above you should have a working Flutter development environment.

Feel free to ask any question in the comments and I’ll be more than happy to help with any questions you may have.

You are ready to proceed to the next post in the series:

Flutter development series – Part 3 – Using databases in Flutter