Chrome OS install

Contents

System requirements

To install and run Flutter, your development environment must meet these minimum requirements:

  • Operating Systems: Linux (64-bit)
  • Disk Space: 600 MB (does not include disk space for IDE/tools).
  • Tools: Flutter depends on these command-line tools being available in your environment.
    • bash
    • curl
    • git 2.x
    • mkdir
    • rm
    • unzip
    • which
    • xz-utils
  • Shared libraries: Flutter test command depends on this library being available in your environment.
    • libGLU.so.1 - provided by mesa packages such as libglu1-mesa on Ubuntu/Debian

For the best experience right now, you should put your Chrome OS Device into developer mode (this is necessary to push apps on the Chrome OS Device). For more information, see how to enable developer mode on your Chromebook.

Get the Flutter SDK

  1. Download the following installation bundle to get the latest stable release of the Flutter SDK:

    (loading…)

    For other release channels, and older builds, see the SDK archive page.

  2. Extract the file in the desired location, for example:

    $ cd ~/development
$ tar xf ~/Downloads/flutter_linux_vX.X.X-stable.tar.xz

  3. Add the flutter tool to your path:

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

    This command sets your PATH variable for the current terminal window only. To permanently add Flutter to your path, see Update your path.

  4. Optionally, pre-download development binaries:

    The flutter tool downloads platform-specific development binaries as needed. For scenarios where pre-downloading these artifacts is preferable (for example, in hermetic build environments, or with intermittent network availability), iOS and Android binaries can be downloaded ahead of time by running:

    $ flutter precache

    For additional download options, see flutter help precache.

You are now ready to run Flutter commands!

Run flutter doctor

Run the following command to see if there are any dependencies you need to install to complete the setup (for verbose output, add the -v flag):

$ flutter doctor

This command checks your environment and displays a report to the terminal window. The Dart SDK is bundled with Flutter; it is not necessary to install Dart separately. Check the output carefully for other software you might need to install or further tasks to perform (shown in bold text).

For example:

[-] Android toolchain - develop for Android devices
    • Android SDK at /Users/obiwan/Library/Android/sdk
    ✗ Android SDK is missing command line tools; download from https://goo.gl/XxQghQ
    • Try re-installing or updating your Android SDK,
      visit https://flutter.dev/setup/#android-setup for detailed instructions.

The following sections describe how to perform these tasks and finish the setup process.

Once you have installed any missing dependencies, run the flutter doctor command again to verify that you’ve set everything up correctly.

Update your path

You can update your PATH variable for the current session at the command line, as shown in Get the Flutter SDK. You’ll probably want to update this variable permanently, so you can run flutter commands in any terminal session.

The steps for modifying this variable permanently for all terminal sessions are machine-specific. Typically you add a line to a file that is executed whenever you open a new window. For example:

  1. Determine the directory where you placed the Flutter SDK. You need this in Step 3.
  2. Open (or create) the rc file for your shell. For example, Linux uses the Bash shell by default, so edit $HOME/.bashrc. If you are using a different shell, the file path and filename will be different on your machine.

  3. Add the following line and change [PATH_TO_FLUTTER_GIT_DIRECTORY] to be the path where you cloned Flutter’s git repo:

    $ export PATH="$PATH:[PATH_TO_FLUTTER_GIT_DIRECTORY]/flutter/bin"
  4. Run source $HOME/.<rc file> to refresh the current window, or open a new terminal window to automatically source the file.

  5. Verify that the flutter/bin directory is now in your PATH by running:

    $ echo $PATH

    Verify that the flutter command is available by running:

    $ which flutter

Update path directly

In some cases, your distribution may not permanently acquire the path when using the above directions. When this occurs, you can change the environment variables file directly. These instructions require administrator privileges:

  1. Determine the directory where you placed the Flutter SDK.

  2. Locate the etc directory at the root of the system, and open the profile file with root privileges.

      $ sudo nano /etc/profile

  3. Update the PATH string with the location of your Flutter SDK directory.

    if [ "`id -u`" -eq 0 ]; then
   PATH="..."
else
   PATH="/usr/local/bin:...:[PATH_TO_FLUTTER_GIT_DIRECTORY]/flutter/bin"
fi
export PATH
  4. End the current session or reboot your system.

  5. Once you start a new session, verify that the flutter command is available by running:

    $ which flutter

For more details on setting the path in Bash, see this StackExchange question. For information on setting the path in Z shell, see this StackOverflow question.

Android setup (without Android Studio)

Install Java

$ sudo apt update
$ sudo apt install default-jre
$ sudo apt install default-jdk

Install the Android SDK’s

Download the Android SDK tools and select the “Command Line Tools only” option.

Drag and drop the downloaded zip into your Linux Files folder through the Chrome OS Files app. This moves it to the home directory, notated as $TOOLS_PATH going forward (~/).

Unzip the tools and then add it to your path.

$ unzip ~/sdk-tools-linux*
$ export PATH="$PATH:$TOOLS_PATH/tools/bin"

Navigate to where you’d like to keep the SDK packages ($PLATFORM_PATH in these snippets) and download the SDK packages using the sdkmanager tool (version numbers here are the latest at time of publishing):

$ sdkmanager "build-tools;28.0.3" "emulator" "tools" "platform-tools" "platforms;android-28" "extras;google;google_play_services" "extras;google;webdriver" "system-images;android-28;google_apis_playstore;x86_64"

Add the Android platform tools to your path (you should find this where you ran the sdkmanager command: $PLATFORM_PATH):

$ export PATH="$PATH:$PLATFORM_PATH/platform-tools"

Set the ANDROID_HOME variable to where you unzipped sdk-tools before (aka your $TOOLS_PATH):

$ export ANDROID_HOME="$TOOLS_PATH"

Now, run flutter doctor to accept the android-licenses:

$ flutter doctor --android-licenses

Next step

Set up your preferred editor.

Flutter & Chrome OS tips & tricks

Wondering how to run your app? On Chrome OS, you can either connect your phone or push directly to the Android container on device. To do that you must enable Developer mode on your machine, and then connect to the local container with ADB:

$ adb connect 100.115.92.2:5555

Want to build your first app optimized for Chrome OS? Clone the flutter-samples repo and build our specific Chrome OS Best Practices example:

$ git clone https://github.com/flutter/samples
$ cd samples/chrome-os-best-practices
$ flutter run

Wondering how to access your favorite F-Key shortcuts on the Chrome OS keyboard?

  • Press the search key along with 1 through = to access F1–F12.

For the current versions of Chrome OS, only certain ports from Crostini are exposed to the rest of the environments. Here’s an example of how to launch Flutter DevTools for an Android app with ports that will work:

$ flutter pub global run devtools -p 8000
$ cd path/to/your/app
$ flutter run --observatory-port=8080

Then, navigate to http://localhost:8000/?port=8080 in your Chrome browser.

Flutter Chrome OS lint analysis

The Flutter team is adding Chrome OS specific Lint Analysis checks that are available to make sure that the app that you’re building is going to work well on Chrome OS. It looks for things like required hardware in your Android Manifest that aren’t available on Chrome OS devices, permissions that imply requests for unsupported hardware, as well as other properties or code that would bring a lesser experience on these devices.

To activate these, you need to create a new analysis_options.yaml file in your project folder to include these options. (If you have an existing analysis_options.yaml file, you can update it)

include: package:flutter/analysis_options_user.yaml
analyzer:
 optional-checks:
   chrome-os-manifest-checks

To run these from the command line, use the following command:

$ flutter analyze

Sample output for this command might look like:

Analyzing ...                                                      
warning • This hardware feature is not supported on Chrome OS • 
android/app/src/main/AndroidManifest.xml:4:33 • unsupported_chrome_os_hardware

This functionality is still under development, but check back for instructions on how you can make this functionality work with your Chrome OS targeted Flutter app.