The goal of this guide is to instruct users on how to set up a local mobile development environment to be used by secDevLabs using the Visual Studio Code editor.
To start developing with Flutter, you must first download the Flutter SDK, which can be found here.
In order to create an Android Emulator, we'll need to first download Android Studio, and then follow the steps:
-
Open Android Studio for the first time and select a
Custom
setup to make sure to checkAndroid Virtual Device
in the installation options. With this, Android Studio will go ahead and download the Android SDK and all the other things needed for development, which will be used behind the scenes by Flutter. -
Open Android Studio and open one of secDevLab's mobile Flutter app, as shown below:
-
Select
Tools
in the upper Android Studio menu bar, thenAVD Manager
and selectCreate Virtual Device
.- If the
AVD Manager
option is not showing up, alternatively, you can look it up using the built in search mechanism. Presscommand
+shift
+a
, then typeAVD Manager
.
- If the
-
Once it opens, select
Create Virtual Device
, as shown below:
- Choose a device definition and select
Next
, as depicted in the image below:
- 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.
- Verify the AVD configuration is correct, and select
Finish
.
If you're feeling a bit lost and need more information, you can find the official documentation here.
After installing Flutter SDK and Android Studio, we should install VS Code, which is a lightweight editor with Flutter app execution and debug support. You can download it here.
- Start Visual Studio Code.
- On the window's left side, you will find the VS Code extensions tab, as shown by the image below. Click it.
- Now, search for
Flutter
in the search bar, then click theinstall
button. This also installs the requiredDart
plugin.
Note: If VS Code doesn't automatically find the Flutter SDK, a message will show in the bottom right corner, but worry not. Your Flutter SDK should be inside the bin
folder. In my case, I saved the Flutter SDK folder to the downloads
folder, so the path should be: ~/Downloads/Flutter/bin
.
If you had any kind of trouble during this installation or intend on using another code editor, you can find more info in the official installation guide here.