Preparing a web app for release

Contents

During a typical development cycle, you test an app using flutter run -d chrome (for example) at the command line. This builds a debug version of your app.

This page helps you prepare a release version of your app.

This page covers the following topics:

Adding a launcher icon

TBD

Obfuscation and minification

Obfuscation and minification is handled for you when you create a release build.

A debug build of a web app is not minified and tree shaking has not been performed.

A profile build is not minified and tree shaking has been performed.

A release build is both minified and tree shaking has been performed.

Building the app for release

Build the app for deployment using the flutter build web command. This generates the app, including the assets, and places the files into the /build/web directory of the project.

The release build of a simple app has the following structure:

/build/web
  assets
    AssetManifest.json
    FontManifest.json
    LICENSE
    fonts
      MaterialIcons-Regular.ttf
      <other font files>
    <image files>
  index.html
  main.dart.js
  main.dart.js.map

Launch a web server (for example, python -m SimpleHTTPServer 8000, or by using the dhttpd package), and open the /build/web directory. Navigate to localhost:8000 in your browser (given the python SimpleHTTPServer example) to view the release version of your app.

Embedding a Flutter app into an HTML page

You can embed a Flutter web app, as you would embed other content, in an iframe tag of an HTML file. In the following example, replace “URL” with the location of your HTML page:

<iframe src="URL"></iframe>

Deploying to the web

When you are ready to deploy your app, upload the release bundle to Firebase, the cloud, or a similar service. Here are a few possibilities, but there are many others:

In future, we plan to generate PWA configuration files to support Progressive Web Apps.