Flutter Flatpak Example

An example of how to package a Flutter application as a Flatpak for distribution on Linux, using the default counter example app.

Flatpak documentation

The necessary configuration files are in the root of the repository for ease of demonstration:

• com.example.FlutterApp.desktop -- desktop menu / icon integration
• icon.svg -- app's icon
• com.example.FlutterApp.json -- Flatpak manifest, instructions on how to build / assemble the flatpak
• com.example.FlutterApp.metainfo.xml -- AppStream metadata file that contains the information about the app that would be presented on an app store like Flathub

Requirements

• flatpak
• flatpak-builder

On ubuntu:

sudo apt install flatpak flatpak-builder

Also required: Flathub setup

Instructions

Note: Building a flatpak should be done in a predictable environment or it may fail.

There is a GitHub action for this purpose, which is demonstrated in this repo. This action's page also lists the docker containers it uses.

If you fork this example repo you can run the example workflow, and install the .flatpak file it generates with flatpak install <path-to-.flatpak>.

Get Flutter project dependencies:

flutter pub get

Build linux version:

flutter build linux

Compress linux build:

tar -C build/linux/x64/release/bundle -cvf FlutterApp-Linux-Portable.tar.gz .

Instruct flatpak-builder to use the manifest to do a flatpak build:

flatpak-builder --force-clean build-dir com.example.FlutterApp.json

Publish to app store

When this succeeds you can proceed to submit to an app store like Flathub.