How to Publish your Flutter App on Windows

As you maybe already know, the flutter's 2.0 stable channel already integrates the feature of building apps for desktop, but it stills in beta, you have to consider that.

In this post, I'm going to show you how to generate the build for Windows and create an installer for your end-user to make his installation process easy as possible.

What do you need before starting?

You only need two things installed in your system:

Flutter
Visual Studio 2019 with the “Desktop development with C++” workload installed, including all of its default components
InnoSetup

The installation of Flutter and Visual Studio won't be explained because it's beyond the scope of this post, but I'll show you the installation of InnoSetup because we are going to create the installer with it.

InnoSetup Installation

First access the InnoSetup's website.
Then find this section and select a link in the Download Sites column:
Execute the innosetup-x.y.z.exe file, as you can see is the classic installation process:

Congrats! You have InnoSetup installed! 🥳

Creating the App

First, you need to enable the desktop environment in flutter by writing the following in PowerShell:

PS > flutter config --enable-windows-desktop

After that you can check the connected devices by executing flutter devices, you should see Windows (desktop) in the list:

PS > flutter devices
1 connected device:

Windows (desktop) • windows • windows-x64 • Microsoft Windows [Version 10.0.18362.1082]
...

If you have problems you can execute flutter doctor to see what's wrong, but you should see something like this:

PS > flutter doctor                                                                     
Doctor summary (to see all details, run flutter doctor -v):                                           
[√] Flutter (Channel beta, 1.27.0-1.0.pre, on Microsoft Windows [Version 10.0.19042.782], locale en-AU)
[√] Android toolchain - develop for Android devices (Android SDK version 30.0.3)                      
[√] Chrome - develop for the web                                                                      
[√] Visual Studio - develop for Windows (Visual Studio Community 2019 16.7.7)                         
[√] Android Studio (version 4.1.0)                                                                    
[√] VS Code (version 1.51.1)                                                                          
[√] Connected device (3 available)

If everything is ok, you can create a new project:

PS > flutter create windowsapp

Then go to the directory:

PS > cd windowsapp

And execute the app 🤩:

PS > flutter run -d windows

Great you are running a flutter app on Windows 🥳🎊🎉!!!

Build a Release App

As easy as running a single command 🥰:

PS > flutter build windows

The build is located in build\windows\runner\Release\:

Distributing the App

Now comes the interesting part and the hardest one, this is because you need to put some .dll files manually (🤮) and create your own installer.

So, you need to place 3 .dll files in the build folder, which are:

msvcp140.dll
vcruntime140.dll
vcruntime140_1.dll

You must find them in the directory C:\Windows\System32. After you place these 3 files your build directory must look like this:

Creating the Installer

Create a folder called installer inside the build folder.
Open InnoSetup and click the first button:

Then click on next:

Then write your data and click next:

Screenshot 2021-04-22 193447.png

You can change the folder settings as you wish, then click on next:

This is the most important step, you have to click the Browse... button and select the .exe file, then click the Add Folder... button and select the Release folder (build\windows\runner\Release\) which is the build folder, finally it will appear a message saying "Should files in subfolders also be included?" you must click Yes and then click on next: