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Support using flutter-dev as the Flutter entrypoint script #5651
Description
flutter-dev is a version of flutter used by developers working on flutter_tools that runs the tool from source instead of precompiling the tool as a snapshot on first run and using the precompiled snapshot for subsequent runs.
Dart-Code should provide support for using flutter-dev to reduce some friction for flutter_tools developers.
From some local experimentation where I renamed flutter-dev to flutter and updated bin/internal/shared.sh to not try to build a snapshot for flutter instead of flutter-dev, it looks like Dart-Code does make use of the existence of bin/cache/flutter_tools.snapshot to determine if the tool is initialized:
[11:06:55 AM] [General] [Info] Searching for SDKs...
[11:06:55 AM] [General] [Info] Environment PATH:
[11:06:55 AM] [General] [Info] /usr/bin
[11:06:55 AM] [General] [Info] /bin
[11:06:55 AM] [General] [Info] /usr/sbin
[11:06:55 AM] [General] [Info] /sbin
[11:06:55 AM] [General] [Info] Took 36ms to search for 1 projects (5 levels)
[11:06:55 AM] [General] [Info] Found projects:
[11:06:55 AM] [General] [Info] /Users/bkonyi/samples/veggieseasons
[11:06:55 AM] [General] [Info] Took 3ms to filter out excluded projects (0 exclusion rules). 1 projects remain.
[11:06:55 AM] [General] [Info] Found Flutter project at /Users/bkonyi/samples/veggieseasons (Pubspec? true, Mobile? true, Create Trigger? false, Flutter Repo? false)
[11:06:55 AM] [General] [Info] Searching for flutter
[11:06:55 AM] [General] [Info] Looking for flutter in:
[11:06:55 AM] [General] [Info] /Users/bkonyi/flutter
[11:06:55 AM] [General] [Info] /Users/bkonyi/flutter -> /Users/bkonyi/flutter/bin
[11:06:55 AM] [General] [Info] /Users/bkonyi/samples/veggieseasons
[11:06:55 AM] [General] [Info] /Users/bkonyi/samples/veggieseasons -> /Users/bkonyi/samples/veggieseasons/bin
[11:06:55 AM] [General] [Info] /Users/bkonyi/flutter/bin/
[11:06:55 AM] [General] [Info] /Users/bkonyi/samples/veggieseasons/.flutter
[11:06:55 AM] [General] [Info] /Users/bkonyi/samples/veggieseasons/.flutter -> /Users/bkonyi/samples/veggieseasons/.flutter/bin
[11:06:55 AM] [General] [Info] /Users/bkonyi/samples/veggieseasons/vendor/flutter
[11:06:55 AM] [General] [Info] /Users/bkonyi/samples/veggieseasons/vendor/flutter -> /Users/bkonyi/samples/veggieseasons/vendor/flutter/bin
[11:06:55 AM] [General] [Info] /usr/bin
[11:06:55 AM] [General] [Info] /bin
[11:06:55 AM] [General] [Info] /usr/sbin
[11:06:55 AM] [General] [Info] /sbin
[11:06:55 AM] [General] [Info] /Users/bkonyi/flutter-sdk
[11:06:55 AM] [General] [Info] /Users/bkonyi/flutter-sdk -> /Users/bkonyi/flutter-sdk/bin
[11:06:55 AM] [General] [Info] Found at:
[11:06:55 AM] [General] [Info] /Users/bkonyi/flutter -> /Users/bkonyi/flutter/bin
[11:06:55 AM] [General] [Info] /Users/bkonyi/flutter/bin/
[11:06:55 AM] [General] [Info] Candidate paths to be post-filtered:
[11:06:55 AM] [General] [Info] /Users/bkonyi/flutter
[11:06:55 AM] [General] [Info] /Users/bkonyi/flutter/bin/ -> /Users/bkonyi/flutter
[11:06:55 AM] [General] [Info] Found at /Users/bkonyi/flutter
[11:06:55 AM] [General] [Info] Returning SDK path /Users/bkonyi/flutter for flutter
[11:06:55 AM] [General] [Info] Flutter is not initialized, running 'flutter doctor' to force...
[11:06:55 AM] [General] [Info] (PROC 16968) Logging data for process...
[11:06:55 AM] [General] [Info] (PROC 16968) Could not find a command named "/Users/bkonyi/flutter/bin/cache/flutter_tools.snapshot".
Usage: dart [vm-options] <command|dart-file> [arguments]
Global options:
-v, --verbose Show additional command output.
--version Print the Dart SDK version.
--enable-analytics Enable analytics.
--disable-analytics Disable analytics.
--diagnostics Show tool diagnostic output.
--suppress-analytics Disallow analytics for this `dart *` run without changing the analytics configuration.
-h, --help Print this usage information.
Available commands:
Project
build Build a Dart application including native assets.
compile Compile Dart to various formats.
create …
[11:06:55 AM] [General] [Info] (PROC 16968) exited (64, null)
Activity
Support using flutter-dev
DanTup commentedon Aug 13, 2025
@bkonyi not sure why that didn't work, there's definitely no mention of "flutter_tools" in Dart-Code that should expect a snapshot.
But anyway, I included a setting for this in todays pre-release (v3.117.20250813 - it might take 20-30 mins to show up):
I have only done some basic testing of it, so I cannot promise it works perfectly, but it's there for you to try. If you find issues with it, please open issues and we can look at fixing (and in the meantime you may just need to leave it off).
Support using flutter-dev (Dart-Code#5653)