Hover - Run Flutter apps on the desktop with hot-reload

Hover is a simple build tool to create Flutter desktop applications.

Hover is brand new and under development, it should be considered alpha. Anything can break, please backup your data before using hover

Hover is part of the go-flutter project. Please report issues at the go-flutter issue tracker.

Install

Hover uses Go to build your Flutter application to desktop. Hover itself is also written using the Go language. You will need to install go on your development machine.

Then install hover like this:

go get -u github.com/go-flutter-desktop/hover

Run the same command to update when a newer version becomes available.

Install these dependencies:

• You need to make sure you have dependencies of GLFW:
  • On macOS, you need Xcode or Command Line Tools for Xcode (xcode-select --install) for required headers and libraries.
  • On Ubuntu/Debian-like Linux distributions, you need libgl1-mesa-dev xorg-dev packages.
  • On CentOS/Fedora-like Linux distributions, you need libX11-devel libXcursor-devel libXrandr-devel libXinerama-devel mesa-libGL-devel libXi-devel packages.
  • See here for full details.

Getting started with an existing Flutter project

This assumes you have an existing flutter project which you want to run on desktop. If you don't have a project yet, follow the flutter tutorial for setting up a new project first.

Init project for hover

cd into a flutter project.

cd projects/simpleApplication

The first time you use hover for a project, you'll need to initialize the project for desktop. hover init requires a project path. This is usualy the path for your project on github or a self-hosted git service. If you are unsure, just make something up, it can always be changed later.

hover init github.com/my-organization/simpleApplication

This creates the directory desktop and adds boilerplate files such as Go code and a default logo.

Optionally, you may add plugins to desktop/cmd/options.go

Optionally, change the logo in desktop/assets/logo.png, which is used as icon for the window.

Make sure you have a main_desktop.dart that contains the following code before runApp(..):

debugDefaultTargetPlatformOverride = TargetPlatform.fuchsia;

Run with manual hot-reload

To run the application and attach flutter for hot-reload support:

hover run

The hot-reload is manual because you'll need to press 'r' in the terminal to hot-reload the application.

By default, hover uses the file lib/main_desktop.dart as entrypoint. You may specify a different endpoint by using the --target flag.

Build standalone application

To create a standalone debug build run this command:

hover build

The output will be in desktop/build/outputs/linux or windows or darwin depending on your OS. Hover does not yet support cross-compilation.

To start the binary: (replace yourApplicationName with your app name)

./desktop/build/outputs/linux/yourApplicationName

It's possible to zip the whole dir desktop/build/outputs/linux and ship it to a different machine.

There is no support for release binaries yet, only debug.

Issues

Please report issues at the go-flutter issue tracker.