Flutter Android setup on Arch Linux

Lenni Migios — Thu, 26 Jun 2025 07:48:34 +0000

What is Flutter?

Flutter is an open-source UI framework, developed by Google that enables developers to build natively compiled applications for mobile (iOS and Android), web, desktop (Windows, macOS, and Linux), and embedded systems using a single code-base. It utilizes the Dart programming language and provides a rich set of pre-designed widgets, tools, and libraries to create visually appealing and high-performance applications.

Issues with installment?

This all sounds great right, one way to design and build apps for all your favorite operating systems. However, the process of going from zero to a full installation with a android emulator in Linux is not straightforward. Personally I found the information and guides online to be at odds with each other and lacking in explanation for some of the issues I came across.

This guide does not promise to solve every issue you personally may come across with your installation however. My system will likely be different to yours.

Installing Flutter

There are multiple ways to install flutter rather. I will be using git, however direct download from the website is a good option as well.
.
Note: avoid using the AUR.

Firstly, install flutter to the opt directory.

cd /opt
git clone https://github.com/flutter/flutter.com

To get flutter to work without root access you will need to change the ownership of the flutter directory.

sudo chown -R yourusername:yourusergroup flutter

To get flutter commands globally, add to your PATH.
Note: below is for bash, change appropriately. for

export PATH="/opt/flutter/bin:$PATH"

Now source your configuration file or restart your terminal.
Note: will differ depending on system

source ~/.bashrc

To test your installation run.

flutter doctor

Your result should look something like this:

If there are less or more ticks on yours do not worry, they indicate the status of tools on your system. The Flutter box should be ticked however.

Setting up a android emulator

A emulator is very useful when testing your flutter applications. It allows us to get instant feedback on updates we make to our code, without uploading to a device.

The best and simplest way I found to do this was by installing Android-Studio.

In this case I installed it using the AUR, however again can be directly downloaded for their website.
Downloading using yay or a equivalent.

yay -Sy android-studio

The benefit of installing android-studio, is it provides a easy to use interface for managing android-sdk and emulators.

Troubleshooting for android-studio

Android-Sdk not working:
A possible reason for this is that android-sdk is installed to /opt/android-sdk by default. This automatically makes it owned by root ==> android-studio cannot make changes to it.

Fix:
Change owner.

cd /opt
sudo chown -R yourusername:yourusergroup android-sdk

Emulator exiting with code 1:
Could be because ANDROID_SDK_ROOT and ANDROID_HOME not assigned correctly (read error message for specifics).

Fix:
Assign either incorrect variable.

export ANDROID_SDK_ROOT=/opt/android-sdk
export ANDROID_HOME=/opt/android-sdk

Emulator missing a shared library:
When using the Google Pixel 8 emulator. It would fail to start due to a missing shared library, libbsd.so.0.

Fix:
Try installing with pacman (for the specific library you are missing).

sudo pacman -S libbsd

Note emulator setup for way land may require extra steps and is more involved.

Neovim integration

With flutter and android-studio setup, you could decide to simply use VS-code which has extensive support for flutter and great extensions. However, if your like me and prefer the neovim experience the flutter-tools.nvim plugin is a great alternative.

To install follow the instructions here:

And you should be good to go!

Note: if using flutter-tools DO NOT use dartls.

Conclusion

I hope this has helped those of you struggling to get flutter working on Arch Linux. Thank you for your time.

DEV Community: Lenni Migios