Desktop Flutter Example

This application shows a minimal example of how to use the desktop libraries to build a runner on each platform, including resource bundling.

In this example, the platform-specific code lives in <platform>. For instance, the macOS project is in macos. This follows the pattern of the android/ and ios/ directories in a typical Flutter application. They are designed to serve as early prototypes of what eventual flutter create for desktop would create, and will be evolving over time to better reflect that goal.

If you are planning to use Flutter in a project that you maintain manually, this example application should be treated as a starting point, rather than an authoritative example. For instance, you might use a different build system, package resources differently, etc. If you are are adding Flutter to an existing desktop application, you might instead put the Flutter application code inside your existing project structure.

(Note: You may be tempted to pre-build a generic binary based on this example that can run any Flutter app. If you do, keep in mind that you must use the same version of Flutter to build flutter_assets as you use to build the runner. If you later upgrade Flutter, or if you distribute the binary version to other people building their applications with different versions of Flutter, it will break.)

Building and Running the Example

Ensure that you are on the latest version of the Flutter master channel.

Enable Desktop Support

The desktop support in the flutter tool is still highly experimental, and must be enabled with an environment variable. Run the command below in the terminal/console you will be using to build and run the example.

On macOS or Linux:

export ENABLE_FLUTTER_DESKTOP=true

On Windows:

• PowerShell:

  $env:ENABLE_FLUTTER_DESKTOP="true"
  

• CMD:

  set ENABLE_FLUTTER_DESKTOP=true
  

Build and Run

You can now run using the flutter tool as you would for mobile. In the 'example' directory, run:

flutter run

or

flutter run --release

Once you've flutter run at least once, you can also build using the underlying projects (Visual Studio, Xcode, or make) directly, but the first build must be done via flutter run in order to generate necessary files.

Note: There is still no flutter create support for for desktop; this works only in a project that has already been configured manually for desktop builds. See the quick-start guide for details.