How to Install Flutter on Windows

Windows install

System requirements

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

• Operating Systems: Windows 7 SP1 or later (64-bit), x86-64 based
• Disk Space: 1.64 GB (does not include disk space for IDE/tools).
• Tools: Flutter depends on these tools being available in your environment.
• Windows PowerShell 5.0 or newer (this is pre-installed with Windows 10)
• Git for Windows 2.x, with the Use Git from the Windows Command Prompt option.

If Git for Windows is already installed, make sure you can run git commands from the command prompt or PowerShell.

Get the Flutter SDK

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

Extract the zip file and place the contained flutter in the desired installation location for the Flutter SDK (for example, C:\Users\\Documents).

Update your path

If you wish to run Flutter commands in the regular Windows console, take these steps to add Flutter to the PATH environment variable:

• From the Start search bar, enter ‘env’ and select Edit environment variables for your account.
• Under User variables check if there is an entry called Path:
• If the entry exists, append the full path to flutter\bin using ; as a separator from existing values.
• If the entry doesn’t exist, create a new user variable named Path with the full path to flutter\bin as its value.

Android setup

Install Android Studio

• Download and install Android Studio.
• Start Android Studio, and go through the ‘Android Studio Setup Wizard’. This installs the latest Android SDK, Android SDK Command-line Tools, and Android SDK Build-Tools, which are required by Flutter when developing for Android.

Set up your Android device

• To prepare to run and test your Flutter app on an Android device, you need an Android device running Android 4.1 (API level 16) or higher.
• Enable Developer options and USB debugging on your device. Detailed instructions are available in the Android documentation.

• Windows-only: Install the Google USB Driver.
• Using a USB cable, plug your phone into your computer. If prompted on your device, authorize your computer to access your device.
• In the terminal, run the flutter devices command to verify that
• Flutter recognizes your connected Android device. By default,
• Flutter uses the version of the Android SDK where your adb
• tool is based. If you want Flutter to use a different installation of the Android SDK, you must set the ANDROID_SDK_ROOT environment variable to that installation directory.

Set up the Android emulator

To prepare to run and test your Flutter app on the Android emulator, follow these steps:

Enable VM acceleration on your machine.

• Launch Android Studio, click the AVD Manager icon, and select Create Virtual Device…
• In older versions of Android Studio, you should instead launch Android Studio > Tools > Android > AVD Manager and select Create Virtual Device…. (The Android submenu is only present when inside an Android project.)
• If you do not have a project open, you can choose Configure > AVD Manager and select Create Virtual Device…
• Choose a device definition and select Next.
• Select one or more system images for the Android versions you want to emulate, and select Next. An x86 or x86_64 image is recommended.
• Under Emulated Performance, select Hardware – GLES 2.0 to enable hardware acceleration.
• Verify the AVD configuration is correct, and select Finish.
• In Android Virtual Device Manager, click Run in the toolbar. The emulator starts up and displays the default canvas for your selected OS version and device.

Additional Windows requirements

Visual Studio 2019 (not to be confused with Visual Studio Code). For Win32 you need the “Desktop development with C++” workload installed, including all of its default components. For UWP you need the “Universal Windows Platform development” workload installed, with the optional UWP C++ tools.

Enable desktop support

$ flutter config --enable-windows-desktop
$ flutter channel dev
$ flutter upgrade
$ flutter config --enable-windows-uwp-desktop

Happy Coding 🙂