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Support multiple (unrelated) Flutter projects in the same workspace for Widget Preview #5671
Description
Splitting this from #5649
Currently we arbitrarily pick the first Flutter project when there are multiple in the project to show the preview for. This feels like a bad limitation (particularly if you have example projects).
It's blocked on flutter/flutter#173550 for now (unless we decide to handle this client-side, but I don't feel like that's the right approach).
Activity
GabrielRStabile commentedon Oct 30, 2025
Hey @DanTup, I'm experiencing a similar issue with Widget Preview when using Flutter beta in VS Code. In my case, only the widget previews from my main project are being recognized, while previews from other packages are not detected.
My app uses a monolithic structure where there's a app folder with the main Flutter project initialized, and additional folders containing Flutter packages without a main.dart file. These packages are linked using a Dart workspace. I believe this scenario is different from the example folder case mentioned in the issue description, since example folders typically contain a separate Flutter app with its own entry point.
Interestingly, when I run the flutter widget-preview start command from the terminal at the workspace root, it correctly detects and displays previews from all packages across the workspace.
This suggests that the VS Code extension might be limiting preview detection to only the first/main Flutter project in the workspace, while the CLI command properly handles the workspace structure and discovers previews in all packages.
Logs from Flutter Widget Preview on VS Code
Dart Code extension: 3.120.1
Flutter extension: 3.120.0 (not activated)
App: Visual Studio Code
App Host: desktop
Version: mac 1.105.1
Logging Categories:
FlutterWidgetPreview
Thu Oct 30 2025 [05:58:06 GMT-0300 (Horário Padrão de Brasília)] Log file started
[05:58:07] [FlutterWidgetPreview] [Info] Spawning /Users/user/.puro/envs/beta/flutter/bin/flutter with args ["widget-preview","start","--machine","--web-server","--dtd-url","ws://127.0.0.1:58285/el18DR_yrSg=","--devtools-server-address","http://127.0.0.1:9100/"]
[05:58:07] [FlutterWidgetPreview] [Info] .. in /Users/user/dart-workspace-root-folder/app
[05:58:07] [FlutterWidgetPreview] [Info] .. with {"toolEnv":{"FLUTTER_HOST":"VSCode","PUB_ENVIRONMENT":"vscode.dart-code","FLUTTER_ROOT":"/Users/user/.puro/envs/beta/flutter"}}
[05:58:07] [FlutterWidgetPreview] [Info] PID: 132
[05:58:15] [FlutterWidgetPreview] [Info] <== [{"event":"widget_preview.logMessage","params":{"level":"warning","message":"Waiting for another flutter command to release the startup lock..."}}]
[05:58:15] [FlutterWidgetPreview] [Info] <== [{"event":"widget_preview.initializing","params":{"pid":352}}]
[05:58:15] [FlutterWidgetPreview] [Info] <== [{"event":"widget_preview.logMessage","params":{"level":"status","message":"Finding previews in /Users/user/dart-workspace-root-folder/app..."}}]
[05:59:00] [FlutterWidgetPreview] [Info] <== [{"event":"widget_preview.logMessage","params":{"level":"status","message":"Found 6 previews."}}]
[05:59:01] [FlutterWidgetPreview] [Info] <== [{"event":"widget_preview.logMessage","params":{"level":"status","message":"Launching the Widget Preview Scaffold on Web Server..."}}]
[05:59:02] [FlutterWidgetPreview] [Info] <== [{"event":"widget_preview.logMessage","params":{"level":"status","message":"Launching lib/main.dart on Web Server in debug mode..."}}]
[05:59:02] [FlutterWidgetPreview] [Info] <== [{"event":"widget_preview.logMessage","params":{"level":"status","message":"Waiting for connection from debug service on Web Server..."}}]
[05:59:31] [FlutterWidgetPreview] [Info] <== [{"event":"widget_preview.logMessage","params":{"level":"status","message":"lib/main.dart is being served at http://localhost:58434"}}]
[05:59:31] [FlutterWidgetPreview] [Info] <== [{"event":"widget_preview.logMessage","params":{"level":"status","message":"The web-server device requires the Dart Debug Chrome extension for debugging. Consider using the Chrome or Edge devices for an improved development workflow."}}]
[05:59:31] [FlutterWidgetPreview] [Info] <== [{"event":"widget_preview.app.webLaunchUrl","params":{"url":"http://localhost:58434","launched":false}}]
[05:59:31] [FlutterWidgetPreview] [Info] <== [{"event":"widget_preview.started","params":{"url":"http://localhost:58434"}}]
[05:59:31] [FlutterWidgetPreview] [Info] <== [{"event":"widget_preview.logMessage","params":{"level":"status","message":"Done loading previews."}}]
Flutter Doctor
Doctor summary (to see all details, run flutter doctor -v):
[✓] Flutter (Channel beta, 3.38.0-0.1.pre, on macOS 26.0.1 25A362 darwin-arm64, locale pt-BR)
[✓] Android toolchain - develop for Android devices (Android SDK version 35.0.0)
[✓] Xcode - develop for iOS and macOS (Xcode 26.0)
[✓] Chrome - develop for the web
[✓] Connected device (3 available)
[✓] Network resources
• No issues found!
[-]Support multiple Flutter projects in the same workspace for Widget Preview[/-][+]Support multiple distinct Flutter projects in the same workspace for Widget Preview[/+][-]Support multiple distinct Flutter projects in the same workspace for Widget Preview[/-][+]Support multiple (unrelated) Flutter projects in the same workspace for Widget Preview[/+]DanTup commentedon Oct 30, 2025
Ah, thanks for the ping. It is a known limitation that we only support this for one "project", however I didn't realise we weren't handling Pub workspaces correctly (which should work). I've opened #5775 to track that separately from this (which is about unrelated projects). Thanks!