Setting up Dart for Local Development

I've been learning Flutter for mobile development lately. I like the journey so far and I'm going to be posting stuff I learn along the way. First, I'll show how to set up Dart for local development. I use asdf for managing different versions of language runtimes on my local machine. I found out about it when trying to set up different Python versions. My dev machine comes with Python 3.7 but at work, we use Python 3.6 and I like having the exact version in use. What to do? asdf to the rescue. asdf has a plugin system that allows the installation of different language runtimes for example you can install Python 3.5, 3.6, and 3.8 on the same machine and switch between them. A lot of languages are supported you can find these here.

To setup asdf run:

#!shell
git clone https://github.com/asdf-vm/asdf.git ~/.asdf --branch v0.7.2`

Replace 0.7.2 with the latest version which you can find here. Next add asdf to your shell like so:

#!shell
echo -e '\n. $HOME/.asdf/asdf.sh' >> ~/.zshrc
echo -e '\n. $HOME/.asdf/completions/asdf.bash' >> ~/.zshrc

Remember to replace .zshrc with your shell-specific config file e.g .bashrc. Reload your config file source .zshrc. You are good to go.

Now let's set up dart. We begin by installing the dart plugin:

#!shell
asdf plugin-add dart

Now we can install dart sdk and tools by running:

#!shell
asdf install dart 2.3.1

Replace 3.2.1 with the latest version or the version you want. You can find these here. You need to choose a global version. This is the version that will be run when you type dart in any shell. You can do this by:

#!shell
asdf global dart 2.3.1

You can also set a version to be used only in the current shell:

#!shell
asdf local dart 2.3.1

Happy darting.