Following the "Install Flutter manually" resulted to error

[joenexus]

Page URL

https://docs.flutter.dev/install/manual/

Page source

https://github.com/flutter/website/tree/main/src/content/install/manual.md

Describe the problem

After downloading the flutter sdk, unzipping and moving it to preferred directory, I tried checking it by running flutter --version but it resulted to error:

$ flutter --version
Error: The Flutter directory is not a clone of the GitHub project.
       The flutter tool requires Git in order to operate properly;
       to install Flutter, see the instructions at:
       https://flutter.dev/get-started

same with dart

dart --version                                                                                                                                                                                                                                
Error: The Flutter directory is not a clone of the GitHub project.
       The flutter tool requires Git in order to operate properly;
       to install Flutter, see the instructions at:
       https://flutter.dev/get-started

Expected fix

Following the instruction should resulted to successful flutter installation.

Additional context

What I did for now is, remove the downloaded sdk and clone the stable version instead.

git clone https://github.com/flutter/flutter.git -b stable

Running flutter --version gives expected result

flutter --version
Flutter 3.35.6 • channel stable • https://github.com/flutter/flutter.git
Framework • revision 9f455d2486 (9 days ago) • 2025-10-08 14:55:31 -0500
Engine • hash a5f2c36e367c13f868cfe98db5806f562c52c35e (revision d2913632a4) (10 days ago) • 2025-10-07 17:26:21.000Z
Tools • Dart 3.9.2 • DevTools 2.48.0

I would like to fix this problem.

• [ ] I will try and fix this problem on docs.flutter.dev.

[piedcipher]

After downloading the flutter sdk, unzipping and moving it to preferred directory, I tried checking it by running flutter --version but it resulted to error:

did you add it to the PATH (environment variable)?

[joenexus]

Yes @piedcipher.

[sfshaza2]

Something similar also happened to me last week. In my case, I had to also reboot my Mac and start over. I'm not sure what the issue was, but this might need to be filed against the SDK itself, not the website.

[sfshaza2]

Given that we've had zero other reports of this problem and also given that what happened in my case was different, I'm lowering the priority of this issue.

(To explain further. I was installing the latest Flutter manually on my Mac and was having all kinds of problems, mostly related to the Mac's tmp files. Rebooting fixed the problem for me.)