With this docker image you don't need to install the Flutter and Android SDK on your developer machine. Everything is ready to use inclusive an emulator device (Pixel with Android 9). With a shell alias you won't recognize a difference between the image and a local installation. If you are using VSCode you can also use this image as your devcontainer.

• flutter (default)
• flutter-android-emulator
• flutter-web

Dependencies

When you want to run the flutter-android-emulator entrypoint your host must support KVM and have xhost installed.

Executing e.g. flutter help in the current directory (appended arguments are passed to flutter in the container):

docker run --rm -e UID=$(id -u) -e GID=$(id -g) --workdir /project -v "$PWD":/project pasowa/flutter help

When you don't set the UID and GID the files will be owned by G-/UID=1000.

Connecting to a device connected via usb is possible via:

docker run --rm -e UID=$(id -u) -e GID=$(id -g) --workdir /project -v "$PWD":/project --device=/dev/bus -v /dev/bus/usb:/dev/bus/usb pasowa/flutter devices

To achieve the best performance we will mount the X11 directory, DRI and KVM device of the host to get full hardware acceleration:

xhost local:$USER && docker run --rm -ti -e UID=$(id -u) -e GID=$(id -g) -p 42000:42000 --workdir /project --device /dev/kvm --device /dev/dri:/dev/dri -v /tmp/.X11-unix:/tmp/.X11-unix -e DISPLAY -v "$PWD":/project --entrypoint flutter-android-emulator  pasowa/flutter

You app will be served on localhost:8090:

docker run --rm -ti -e UID=$(id -u) -e GID=$(id -g) -p 42000:42000 -p 8090:8090  --workdir /project -v "$PWD":/project --entrypoint flutter-web pasowa/flutter

You can also use this image to develop inside a devcontainer in VSCode and launch the android emulator or web-server. The android emulator need hardware acceleration, so their is no best practice for all common operating systems.

For developers using Linux as their OS I recommend this approach, because it's the overall cleanest way.

Add this .devcontainer/devcontainer.json to your VSCode project:

{
  "name": "Flutter",
  "image": "pasowa/flutter",
  "extensions": ["dart-code.dart-code", "dart-code.flutter"],
  "runArgs": [
    "--device",
    "/dev/kvm",
    "--device",
    "/dev/dri:/dev/dri",
    "-v",
    "/tmp/.X11-unix:/tmp/.X11-unix",
    "-e",
    "DISPLAY"
  ]
}

When VSCode has launched your container you have to execute flutter emulators --launch flutter_emulator to startup the emulator device. Afterwards you can choose it to debug your flutter code.

Add this .devcontainer/devcontainer.json to your VSCode project:

{
  "name": "Flutter",
  "image": "pasowa/flutter",
  "extensions": ["dart-code.dart-code", "dart-code.flutter"]
}

Start your local android emulator. Afterwards reconnect execute the following command to make it accessable via network:

adb tcpip 5555

In your docker container connect to device:

adb connect host.docker.internal:5555

You can now choose the device to start debugging.

All software contained in this image can be easily customized just by specifing arguments with version number to the docker build command:

docker build --build-arg FLUTTER_VERSION=3.0.5 --build-arg FLUTTER_CHANNEL=stable ...

Why not using alpine?

Alpine is based on musl instead of glibc. The dart binaries packaged by flutter are linked against glibc so the Flutter SDK is not compatible with Alpine - it's possible to fix this but not the core attempt of this image.