Codecademy Team

Flutter Installation Overview

This article will describe installing the tools needed to support Flutter development.

Introduction

Before we start building apps with Flutter, we need to prepare our development environment. These steps include:

Installing the Flutter SDK
Installing Android Studio
(Mac Only) Installing XCode

We will cover each step in this article. Let’s get started!

Installing the Flutter SDK

We need the Flutter Software Development Kit (SDK) to create Flutter apps. SDKs include all the necessary tools to allow developers to build applications. The Flutter SDK includes:

Dart programming language tools
Utilities such as the flutter command
Libraries for widgets and animation

We can install Flutter on most popular operating systems. Follow the link below for your system:

Once we’ve installed the SDK, we must install our development environment.

Installing an IDE

To develop applications, we will need an IDE or Integrated Development Environment. This environment is where we will:

Edit code
Organize our files
Compile and run our app

While we can use several IDEs to develop Flutter applications, this course will focus on using Android Studio. This choice simplifies the setup process.

Installing Android Studio

Android Studio is Google’s integrated development environment (IDE) that we use to build apps for Android devices. Android Studio includes:

An IDE with a powerful code editor
Android SDK to build and package Android applications
Emulators of different virtual Android devices
The ability to connect to physical Android devices

Follow the link below for installation instructions for your system:

Xcode (Mac only)

Xcode is Apple’s integrated development environment (IDE) that we use to build apps for Apple products such as the iPhone and Mac. Similar to Android Studio, Xcode includes:

An IDE for writing apps
Device simulators for different iOS versions
Tools such as compilers and debuggers

We cannot run Xcode on a PC. However, developers can create Flutter apps on PCs and then later build them on a Mac with Xcode. The following article will walk through the steps to install Xcode:

Install XCode on Mac

Review

Let’s review the Flutter setup process:

First, we must install the Flutter SDK
Next, we install the Android Studio IDE
Developers who want to build for iOS can install Xcode (Mac only)

Great! Now we have installed our Flutter tools; we should check our configuration. Flutter has a built-in tool to do this called Flutter Doctor. We will cover using this in the next article.