Flutter Crash Course #2 - Installing on Windows

Key Takeaways

all right then gangs so the first thing we need to do then is install flutter on our computer so that we can make flutter applications now this can sometimes be a bit of an arduous process and it's going to be slightly different depending whether you're on Windows or Mac so I've made two videos one showing you how to install flutter on Windows which is this one and then another one showing you how to install flutter on a Mac which is going to be the next video so feel free to skip to that next one if you're on a Mac if you're on Windows stick with this video right here all right so I'm on the flutter docs which you can find at docs. flutter. deev and you want to click on this getting started link right here then choose your operating system which in this case is Windows then click on mobile as the type of application we want to make once you've done that you're going to see a getting started guide that we can walk through and get up and running with so the first thing we need to do is install git on our computer which is a software requirement so just click on this link right here to download for Windows you can download it by pressing this button right here once you've done that just walk through the installation steps and accept all the default options all right so we also need to install Android Studio that's also a requirement but we're going to come back to that step later on first of all I want to scroll down and see how to install the flutter SDK itself and by the way it mentions here about configuring a text editor for writing flutter applications and that if you're using vs code to install the flutter extend ension for vs code that was the extension that I mentioned in the first lesson so if you've not already installed that definitely make sure you do but down here where it says install the flutter SDK is what I want to look at now so we've got a couple of options here we can use vs code to install or we can just download it and install it manually which is what we're going to do so click on this and then it says download the following installation bundle to get the latest stable release of the flutter SDK so you want to click on this to download it and just wait for that to download up here and if we scroll down here it's going to say create a folder where you can install flutter and a few examples of where you should create your folder now we'll do that in a second but another warning down here just says the path to where you install flutter should not contain any special characters or spaces or require elevated privileges so just bewy of those two things and it gives an example here that this fails both conditions because we have this space and it also requires elevated privileges all right so then what we need to do once we've created a folder to install flutter we need to extract the zip file into the directory that we wanted to install it in so the directory we just created up here all right so I'm in my downloads now I can see this flutter Windows stable zip folder I'm going to extract this and I want to choose a place to install flutter so I'm going to browse to do that I'm going to go to the C drive over here and and I've already created this folder called Dev right here you don't have to create a folder called Dev you can call it what you want or place it where you want just remember it shouldn't contain spaces and it shouldn't be in a folder that requires elevated privileges so I'm going to go into this folder and this is where I want to install floter so I'm going to select that folder then click on extract and hopefully this is just going to take a minute or two and it'll be done all right and when that's done you should see this flutter folder right here with all of these different folders and files inside them so now that's installed inside our Dev folder right here on the C drive awesome okay then so now we have flutter installed but in order for us to run flutter commands in a terminal within different locations on our computer we need to add flutter to the path variable when we do this it makes the flutter command globally accessible on our computer and then we can start to use it wherever we need to so to do this click on your search icon to search your computer and then start typing in variables and at some point you should get a suggestion called edit the system environment variables click on that and then in this window click on environment variables then select the path variable and click edit now if you look at my paths I've already got here you can see one of them whose value is C drive then dev then flutter then bin so this is a path to the bin folder inside the flutter folder we just added and this is the path that you need to add if you installed flutter in the same location as I did if you installed elsewhere it needs to be a path to wherever you installed it then in the bin folder within that location so to add this path just click on new and then type it in once you've done that we can click on okay on all of these windows to close them all and now we can move on to the next step of the setup which is installing Android Studio but just really quickly before we do that if you close down any currently open ser first of all and then open up Powershell or Windows terminal again we can run a diagnostic command called flutter doctor so to do that we can be in any directory and just type in flutter then a space then doctor and hit enter and what this command does is look at our computer to make sure everything is set up for us to start developing flutter applications and where there's something missing it's going to let us know about that now if this command doesn't work for you then just go back and make sure you've done every step in this video so far correctly and also make sure you close down your current version of Powershell or The Terminal first of all and then reopen it and try again so if we scroll up here we can see inside flutter doctor anything with a green tick is a requirement that we have already fulfilled anything else we haven't so we can see down here we don't have Visual Studio installed but that's okay because we only need to install this if we want to develop Windows applications and we don't really want to do that so we do do still need to install Android studio and that's what we're going to do next so back on the flutter docs if we scroll up near the top again we're going to see that another requirement of using flutter is to have Android Studio installed we won actually be working within Android Studio itself but flutty uses it under the hood and we'll also be using it to make a virtual Android device to run our applications on on our computer now if you click on this link it's going to take you to the Android Studio website where you can download the latest version so just click on this link right here to grab the latest version and then click on the button right here to download it you might need to accept some terms and conditions before it downloads but when you've done that you should see in your downloads an executable file so just wait for that to download and then fire it up but just quickly while we wait if we head back to the flutter site and scroll down a little bit you're going to see that where it says configure Android Studio we have to make sure the following components get installed so in a minute when we run through the installation and start up Android Studio we should see the option to install each of these things all right then so hopefully that's downloaded we can go over here and click on this to open up the installer and then click on next accept the defaults next next install just going to take a few minutes okay so now click on next and then finish make sure you start Android Studio as well because we need to make sure that these components are installed all right so let me scoot this over so if you go to more actions now and then go to SDK manager then we need to make sure we have this selected 33 mine's already installed yours might not be but just check this to make sure you're going to install it go to SDK tools and you want to make sure that this right here the command line tools that's checked you also want the build tools which is the top one the Android emulator which is this one right here and then the platform tools which is this one right here you can see these things right here these are installed I've got a couple of updates available but don't worry about those yours might not say install but when you click on apply once you check those it's going to install them for you I've already done it like I've said which is why it says installed but just make sure you install those components first of all and then click on okay all right then so next we need to set up and configure an Android emulator so that we can test our FL applications on it so to do that go to more actions again this time go to virtual device manager create a virtual device choose your phone I'm going to go with the pixel 6 and then I'm going to go to next then I'm going to choose this API level right here 33 choose that and click next then you can give this a name if you want to come down here I'm going to go to graphics and I'm going to select hardware for this and this is going to lead to faster rendering so I'm going to then click on finish and it should create that virtual device for us now you can click on play over here if you want to launch the emulator which might just take a minute okay and now we can see this is the emulator right here that we're going to use when we're testing out our flut application so for now I'm going to get rid of that we don't need it open and we can also cross this off as well and I'll minimize this next up I want to come back to the terminal and I just want to run flutter doctor again just to see if we have any updates because we now installed Android studio and we also have an emulator Reddit as well so we can see everything is now ticked except Visual Studio but again we don't need to install that because we're not going to develop Windows applications so that's absolutely fine everything else is ticked which is really good so now we're ready to start creating flutter applications now if this is the first time you're using Android studio on your computer you might also have to accept the Android licenses and you can do that by following these steps opening an elevated console window and then running the following command in that terminal floter doctor and then hyphen hyphen Android licenses once you do that it's going to show you the licenses you can accept them if you've already previously accepted them it's just going to show you this message right here but either way you probably need to do that if this is your first time using Android on the computer and you might actually see when you run flutter doctor without this that you need to run this command before you start making flutter apps all right my friends pH so we have finally installed flutter and everything else that we need to start making flutter applications on windows with in the next video I'll be walking you through how to get everything set up on a Mac so if you want to work with flutter just on Windows then feel free to skip that next lesson and move on to Lesson Four where we're going to make a brand new flutter application