Welcome to part 1 of the Windows Flutter installation instructions, which hopefully means that you
have a PC running Windows 7 or later.
These are some of the minimum requirements that you'll need to get started installing Flutter including
having at least 400 megabytes of free space.
But practically speaking, you'll actually want more. Although Flutter only requires 400 megabytes as a
minimum requirement,
you'll want at least 10 gigabytes free on your hard disk because you also have to install Android Studio
as well as virtual devices like the Android emulator.
Finally you'll also need to have a program called 'Git' installed.
Now don't worry if you don't or you don't know if you do,
we're going to check it together and we're going to do the installation together.
So first things first, you're going to need the Flutter SDK, and you can get this as well as all the step
by step installation instructions from flutter.dev/docs/get-started Now,
once you're here, you're going to choose the Windows track, and an important note to notice is that if you
are based in China where the Google servers are disabled,
make sure you head over here where you'll find that the Flutter community has set up mirrors for all
of the downloads that you'll need to get Flutter up and running so that all the download links will
work even if you're based in China.
All right.
So let's go ahead into the Windows insulation instructions.
Now at this point if you don't have 'Git' installed, be sure to click on this link
'Git for Windows', and it will take you to a page that will automatically start downloading Git for your
system.
And once it's complete, double click on the file and it will start installing it onto your Windows system.
Now this has a really simple setup wizard.
And you basically just click next and keep all of the default requirements and keep going until you
get to the end.
Once that's done, then we're ready to start downloading the Flutter SDK.
This is going to contain all the code that we'll need to be able to start developing Flutter apps.
Now, once you already, click on this big blue button and you should download the Flutter for Windows zip
file. Now, once download is finished,
go ahead and open up the zip file and you'll need to click on extract all.
Now the place that we're going to extract it to is really important.
Flutter recommends putting it in a file path that's directly in the C drive for example C:\src
\flutter
Now it's really important that you don't put this in something like C:/programfiles which requires
special access privileges.
We want all users to be able to access this Flutter folder.
So once you're done, go ahead and select show extracted files when complete and extract it to that location.
Now it's going to take a while to complete.
But once it's done, it should open up inside our src\flutter
and then you've got Flutter installed on your system and you can start running Flutter commands by locating
the file could flutter_console.bat. Double click on it, and when you do this, you might
encounter a 'Windows protected your PC' popup.
And if you do, go ahead and click on 'more info' and go ahead and click on 'run anyways.' And this will open
up the command prompt in Windows and you can start typing Flutter commands such as flutter --
version and it will tell you that you've got Flutter
1.2.1 currently installed on your system.
But as it is, we can only use Flutter from the command prompt.
It knows how to locate the Flutter package.
But if we want to use it from somewhere else,
say Android Studio or if we just opened up a normal Windows command prompt, then we'll need to tell it
where this Flutter package is located.
So to prevent having to do that every single time, we're going to set our path variable.
So if you head into start and you search for 'env' then you should see a link to edit environment variables
for your account.
So that's what we're going to click on.
And over here, under the user variables, check to see if there's an entry code path.
And I can see it right here.
Once you found it,
go ahead and select it and click on 'edit', and inside this variable value, navigate all the way to the end
of what currently exists.
And then you're going to add the full path to our flutter\bin
So if you go over here you can see that there is the bin folder right here,
and the way to navigate to it is C:\src\flutter\flutter\bin So that's
what we're going to add to our path. All the way at the very end,
We're going to add a ; and then you're going to type the path to locate that bin folder.
So in my case it's going to be C:\src\flutter\flutter\bin
bin. And check to make sure that you don't have any errors in them and then go ahead and click OK to
add the path variable.
Now if you don't have a user variable code path, then you can simply go ahead and create a new one that's
called Path, P-A-T-H, with all caps and then put in that variable value as the location of that bin folder
that we typed in just now. Once you're done,
go ahead and click Ok.
And you should now be able to run Flutter from anywhere.
So for example, I could simply open up command prompt from START, and I should be able to type a flutter
--version and it should confirm to me that I have a Flutter
1.2.1 installed on my current system.
Now another really helpful console command is 'flutter doctor', and it will diagnose to see how our Flutter
is set up and if there are any other things that we still need to sort out before we can continue.
So you can see that in this checklist we've got Flutter set up and ready to go.
We've got little checkmark but for everything else including Android Studio, Android toolchain and
any connected devices, all of these have a exclamation mark.
So that's what we're going to address in the next lesson.
We're going to install Android Studio and get set up for android development.
So, for all of that and more, I'll see on the next lesson.