All about the Pub command line tool for Flutter and Dart

There’s so much more than flutter pub get

Modified screenshot from pub.dev

If you’ve been working with Flutter for any length of time, you’ve probably run flutter pub get in the terminal or at least seen a popup about it from your IDE. The Pub tool has a lot more than just get to offer you, though. Pub is the official repository for the Flutter and Dart packages available at pub.dev, and pub is your command line interface to that repository. This article will introduce the many options that are available with the Pub tool.

Overview

Assuming you have a recent version of Flutter and Dart installed and in your path, open a terminal and run the following command to see all the options that pub offers:

flutter pub -h

The -h means help. You can also use --help instead.

Here is the printout:

add         Add a dependency to pubspec.yaml..
cache       Work with the Pub system cache.
deps        Print package dependencies.
downgrade   Downgrade packages in a Flutter project.
get         Get packages in a Flutter project.
global      Work with Pub global packages.
login       Log into pub.dev..
logout      Log out of pub.dev..
outdated    Analyze dependencies to find which ones can be upgraded.
pub         Pass the remaining arguments…