Flutter Installation for Windows
Understand how to install Flutter on a Windows system by downloading the framework, configuring the environment variable path, and verifying the setup using flutter doctor. Learn the importance of selecting an IDE like Android Studio or Visual Studio Code to create virtual devices and test your Flutter applications effectively.
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For a local Flutter setup, our first task is to install the Flutter framework. Next, we need to go to the Flutter installation page.
Flutter installation guide
When we click on the download button it will automatically start downloading the Flutter zipped file in your download folder.
We may copy that extracted file elsewhere or keep it there.
We have kept the extracted flutter file in the Downloads folder and created a new environment path for the user. We have made this global environment path because we want to work through the command prompt in the future.
Creating a new environment variable path in any Windows operating system is also easy.
In the Windows 10 operating system, when we type “environment variable” in the search prompt, it will automatically open up the related window for us. You can see this window in the figure below:
We can copy-paste the whole path there, like below:
Now, we can open the command prompt and type flutter doctor to check whether we have any Flutter-related IDE installed already. It will also check whether we have any connected devices or not.
In this case, we have not installed Android Studio or any other Flutter-related IDE beforehand.
To work with Flutter, we need a good IDE. We recommend installing Android Studio or any good IDE where we can connect a device right after downloading Flutter.
The connected device is just a virtual mobile device to check and test our mobile application. It can also be the Chrome browser to test web applications (only in Flutter 1.9+).
We need Android Studio as an IDE first. It is the best choice because it allows us to create a virtual device.
However, we recommend Visual Studio Code IDE because we find it more flexible in writing code, and it is also quite popular.
In the Flutter doctor summary, we can see that Android Studio is unavailable.