Setting Up Flutter On Mac OS X

I tried Flutter about a year ago (I like to try everything out there) and I recall it being super easy. I thought I’d try it again. Here’s the sequence I followed.

Install all the pieces of your Flutter dev environment

Go here and follow all the instructions. It took me 1.5 hour to get everything configured the way that ‘flutter -v doctor’ told me to do so. Nothing broke along the way. Really!

I was skeptical when I had to do things like this:

Some of the arcane error messages that come from "flutter -v doctor" that gave me trepidation.

But in the end I made it … that was a relief. Stuff like this made me a little nervous like it always does …

🍺  /usr/local/Cellar/libimobiledevice/HEAD-2332655_3: 67 files, 1MB, built in 40 seconds
==> Caveats

Even though the doctor said everything was okay …

A full clean bill of health from "flutter -v doctor" indicated I might be able to go forward. And I did.

Run the iOS version of the base Flutter app

So then you follow the instructions on the same install page with:

$ flutter create my_app
$ cd my_app
$ flutter run

And then it actually … works (at least in my case):

The Flutter demo successfully running on an iOS emulator with the command line results in frame.

Getting it to work on a real device requires using your Xcode setup plus a valid APDA membership (which I’m always lapsing but maybe in this case I’ll re-up once again …). It took me 10 minutes to get their iOS demo running, and I figure I might lose 30+ minutes going the full XCode route — so I’ll save that one for later.

Run the Android version of the base Flutter app

I was impressed because when I figured out how to attach to the different simulator devices with:

$ flutter devices

And then you can pick the device you want to deploy to (be sure to enclose the name in quotation marks) and … it runs!

The Flutter demo successfully running on an Android emulator with the command line results in frame.

This only took me 10 more minutes on top of the previous iOS simulator run. Okay. I think I might be hooked. —JM