Building Flutter apps

This page describes how to build Fluter apps.

1. Installing Flutter SDK

See also: Desktop support for Flutter

$ git clone https://github.com/flutter/flutter
$ sudo mv flutter /opt/
$ export PATH=$PATH:/opt/flutter/bin
$ flutter config --enable-linux-desktop
$ flutter doctor

Please note that you must use the same version (channel) that you built Flutter embedder for. I recommend that you use the latest version of the master channel for both the SDK and Flutter Engine. See also: Building Flutter Engine

2. Building Flutter apps

Here introduce how to build the flutter sample app.

Self-build

This is the method when the build machine and the target machine are the same. (x64 targets on x64 hosts / for Arm64 targets on Arm64 hosts)

Note that you need to build Flutter apps in the same mode(release/debug) libflutter_engine.so was built. It means you need to build Flutter apps in the release mode if you use libflutter_engine.so was built in release mode.

Build in release mode:

$ flutter create sample
$ cd sample/$ cd sample/
$ flutter build linux

The build result: build/linux/{cpu-arch}/release/bundle/

Build in debug mode:

$ flutter create sample
$ cd sample/$ cd sample/
$ flutter build linux --debug

The build result: build/linux/{cpu-arch}/debug/bundle/

Also, You can do the following steps on both x64 and arm64 hosts. In debug mode, the Flutter bundle artifacts are not architecturally different between x64 and arm64.

$ flutter build bundle --asset-dir=./bundle/data/flutter_assets
$ cp <path_to_flutter_sdk_install>/bin/cache/artifacts/engine/linux-*/icudtl.dat ./bundle/data

Cross-build (For Arm64 targets on x64 hosts)

Comming soon. We are contributing to support this now. See: https://github.com/flutter/flutter/issues/74929