Running a Flutter App on Fuchsia with FImage

This guide assumes you have already configured FImage for Flutter development. If you have not, see Setting up FImage for Application Development. Flutter should work fine with most apps. If your application uses 3rd-party packages that doesn't support Fuchsia, it might not work.

Configure FImage Environment Variables

Before you can deploy your Flutter app, you must register FImage's SSH configuration with the Flutter tool.

From inside the FImage directory, run:

export FUCHSIA_SSH_CONFIG="/path/to/fimage/ssh/ssh_config"

If you want the configuration to be persistent, add that command to your shell's init script.

Add a Manifest to the Application

Head over to your Flutter app's folder. For this example we will be using the dahliaOS Calculator (opens in a new tab). From the root of your Flutter app, create the folder fuchsia, and inside of that, create the folder meta. Inside of the newly created meta directory, create a file called calculator.cmx. You should have created the following directory structure inside of your Flutter app's folder:

calculator/fuchsia
└── meta
    └── calculator.cmx

Inside of the file calculator.cmx, add the following content for a basic Flutter App:

{}

⚠️

You may need to tweak this to be compatible with more complicated applications. See the Component Manifest (opens in a new tab) document on fuchsia.dev for more information.

Deploy the Application

Now that the application is modified to work with Fuchsia, open another terminal window and start FImage:

./network-config

./fimage-gui 4096

Once the emulator is started and on the home screen, it should show up under flutter devices. You can now run the application using the following command:

flutter run -d fuchsia --verbose

The application should compile and launch on the virtual device.

FImage App Development Packaging