Common Flutter commands that can be run from the commandline

Creating a Flutter project via Android Studio is so cumbersome. The various views of project files that make it difficult to find files, the various buttons and dropdown options that need to be found and clicked for every simple little thing. So I decided to stop using Android Studio and switched to VS Code and the commandline when I realized that even the emulator could be run from the commandline. I'm creating this blog post as a quick reference for myself.

To disable reporting of telemetry:

• flutter config --no-analytics; flutter --disable-analytics

To run various checks on Flutter:

• flutter doctor
• flutter doctor -v 
• flutter doctor --android-licenses 

Create a new app:

• flutter create my_new_app_name

Run a Flutter app to try it out as a Linux application:

This command enables Linux as a target platform for building Flutter applications.

• flutter config --enable-linux-desktop  
• flutter run
• flutter run --debug 

This command builds a release version in Linux:

• flutter build linux --release     

Clean the build:

• flutter clean

Add dependencies to pubspec.yaml:

• flutter pub add <package_name> 

Add development dependencies: 

• flutter pub add <package_name> --dev

Download all the dependencies specified in pubspec.yaml:

• flutter pub get

Build an APK for Android with multiple APK's for different platforms bundled into one APK:

This command ends up creating a much bigger APK than necessary.

• flutter build apk

Build separate APK files for each platform:

• flutter build apk --split-per-abi --release

View what emulated devices are available:

• flutter emulators

Start an emulated device:

Search for the names with underscores. Those are the ones you can use to run a specific emulator. For example, a name like Large_Desktop_API_33 or Medium_Tablet_Edited_API_34 or Pixel_3a_API_34 

• flutter emulators --launch <emulated device name>

View what emulated devices are running now:

Search for emulated device id's which look like emulator-5554 as an example. Those are the device id's which you can use to install an APK or shutdown the emulator etc.

• flutter devices
• adb devices 

View which architecture the emulated device has:

• adb devices -l 

Install the APK into a device and run:

This is for installing and running the APK which has multiple APK's bundled into it. This command will uninstall any older APK that was present in the device and 

• flutter install -d <emulated device id> --release

This is for installing and running the APK's which were created using the `split-per-abi` command:

• adb install path/to/file/<filename>.apk
• adb -s <emulated device id> install path/to/file/<filename>.apk

Shutdown an emulated device:

• adb -s <emulated device id> emu kill