Mobile Development Workshop 2023

Prerequisities

Below are instructions to get setup with flutter before the workshop with your respective operating system.

• MacOS
• Windows

Then proceed with vscode extension installation instructions

• VSCode setup

If you run into problems feel free to either get help at the start of the workshop or reach out earlier.

Flutter Installation

MacOS

Customised Way

The lazy way may not apply to you if you wish to do some customisation of the installation process such as you wish to use flutter as a global command.

Please visit https://docs.flutter.dev/get-started/install/macos for more information.

Lazy way

The lazy way of installing flutter is to use the mac_config.sh script inside of this repo.

Download the mac_config.sh file

Grab the mac_config.sh files from https://drive.google.com/file/d/1EFcpJpG1gCen4I31-xXxTMDhjCEdP6xu/view?usp=sharing

The script basically does 3 things.

1. Download the zip of Flutter SDK
2. Unzip it to the current directory
3. Add the SDK bin directory to the $PATH variable

To run it, you need to first give an executable permission

chmod +x ./mac_config.sh

Then you can run the script

sh ./mac_config.sh

Notice this way sets your PATH variable for the current terminal window only, please look at the Customised Way for global flutter command usage. Everytime you restart the terminal you need to retype the following command again.

export PATH="$PATH:`pwd`/flutter/bin"

Windows

Step 1

Download the flutter SDK from https://docs.flutter.dev/get-started/install/windows and unzip it

Here I got it under D:\DEVS

Step 2

Add Flutter to the PATH environment variable

From the Start search bar (Shortcut: win + s), enter ‘env’ and select Edit environment variables for your account.

Under User variables check if there is an entry called Path.

• If the entry exists, you can follow the instructions and add the full path of flutter\bin in the pop up Edit environment variable window.

• Or after clicking Edit, the Edit User Variable window pops up, then you append the full path to flutter\bin using ; as a separator from existing values.

• Or if the entry does not exist, you can click on New.. and create the new entry.

Trick - the full path of flutter\bin can be copy from the address bar in the File Explorer

Step 3

Check if adding successfully

If you have configured it successfully, by typing

flutter --version

in the command prompt, you should be able to see the version information of flutter

Q: What if I did not configure it successfully?

Say there is something went wrong in your path and something like this shows up.

Well, imagine you might already felt tired with the path configuration process. It is equivalent to use the full path of flutter.bat as a command directly in the command prompt. In my case,

D:\DEVS\flutter_windows_3.0.5-stable\flutter\bin\flutter.bat --version

is the same assets

flutter --version

Installing flutters dependencies.

Flutter requires some dependences on other libraries e.g. android sdk. To find out what to install run:

flutter doctor -v

e.g.

For each [X], resolve the dependency by installing the suggested tools.

VS Code Configuration

1 Install Visual Studio Code Select the right edition of VS Code for your device from https://code.visualstudio.com/

2. Install Flutter Extension

Optional

Android Setup

1. Install Android Studio
2. Enable Developer Options and USB Debugging on Android Device.
3. Plug Phone Via USB
4. Check if Flutter recognizes device using flutter devices
5. Run the app using the Android Device.

IOS Simulator Setup

1. Install XCode
2. Run the following commands.

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

3. Open XCode once to sign licence agreement
4. Run following command open -a Simulator to setup IOS Simulator
5. Run the app using the IOS Simulator.

Please visit https://docs.flutter.dev/get-started/install/macos for more information.