Existing tooling
As with any software project the first thing you should do is have a look at what pre-existing software is available that might solve your problem.
Maintaining any software is expensive, so if someone else is offering to do it for you...
Dart that eco system has a number of pre-exiting tools this guide notes a few of the more common ones.
Drop us a line if you know of some other build tools that you think should be listed here.
To be complete here are some of the build related tools built into dart
- dart format - format your source code
- dart doc - generates Dart api documenation
- dart fix - fixes common lint errors
- dart compile - compiles a Dart library with a
main
entry point to an exe - dart create - creates a Dart project
build_runner is a core Dart package and used by many packages to automate the build process.
If you are doing json serialisation then you will already have come across build_runner as it is used to generate the toJson and fromJson methods.
You can also use build_runner in your on project to automate build steps.
Unfortunately the documentation on build runner is fairly sparse and and hard to follow. If you want to use build_runner have a look at some of the projects that depend on build_runner.
pub.dev shows a list of packages that use (depend on) a package. This provides an easy way to find sample code for any package.
Github supports actions which allow you to automate a build/test process each time you push to git.
Github actions support Linux, Windows and MacOS which allows you to build a target for multiple OSs.
Github actions are essentially a declarative system as opposed to procedural.
I've never been a fan of declarative build systems (all the way back to make) as they tend to rely on too many magic interactions between declarative steps.
Last modified 10mo ago