Hi guys, in this brief guide I'll show how to manage flutter channels. Why? because navigating into channels can be fun and also helpful to test some future feature that maybe your team will need to implement. Without further ado, let's dive into Flutter Channels!

Channel types

Flutter has 4 channels:

• Stable
• Beta
• Dev
• Master

Stable

This channel is the recommended one for production releases; If you don't want to use a new feature or want to play with flutter this is your go-to branch!

Beta

In this channel the flutter team picks the best dev channel build of the previous month, this is the last step before merging new features inside the stable channel.

Dev

You can find the latest tested builds inside this branch, so it's a bit safer than the master channel, but always watch for Bad Builds; this page provide to you all the known blocking-bugs.

Master

This channel contains all the latest features of flutter, pay attention using this, you can find a various number of bugs

Usage

Switching channels is very easy, to switch from you stable channel open you terminal and type flutter channel channelName and, after a brief moment you will see the console printing a message:

git: Switched to a new branch 'your_new_branch'

you've successfully switched your channel!

To be sure to use the latest version of the channel always run a flutter upgrade; it will download all the latest required files from GitHub.

Tip:

If you often switch channels or it's been a while since developing a Flutter project I recommend you to run a flutter channel before start coding; you will check on which channel are you on and avoid to develop on the wrong one!

What do to now?

Now that you know everything about channels, start switching to one of them and enjoy trying new features or solve some bug, there are actually almost 10.000 issues on the official Repo.

Wanna check more tutorials? Click here! See you soon!