Manual
Introduction
Puro is a powerful tool for installing and upgrading Flutter versions, it is essential for developers that work on multiple projects or have slower internet.
Why do we need another version manager?
Flutter is typically installed by cloning the flutter/flutter repository, checking out the desired version, and letting
the bin/flutter shell script download pre-built engine binaries. This workflow is great for people working on the
framework, but regular app developers end up downloading hundreds of megabytes more data than necessary.
Puro significantly improves this process by downloading both the framework code and engine in parallel, caching the engine, and caching the git history. These optimizations result in a 20% faster initial setup (including installing Puro itself) and 50-95% faster upgrades.
Installation
Puro is distributed as a precompiled executable (you do not need Dart installed), see the quick installation instructions at https://puro.dev/
When you install Puro, it places itself in ~/.puro (%userprofile%\.puro on Windows) including all caches, git
repos, engine builds, configuration, etc.
Puro will automatically add Flutter and itself to the PATH, warning you if there are existing Dart or Flutter installations that could interfere. A standalone version is also available if you don't want Puro messing with your profile.
At most once a day, the tool will automatically check for updates and prompt you to run puro upgrade-puro if one is
available, this can be disabled by adding enableUpdateCheck: false to ~/.puro/prefs.json.
Environments
Listing environments
Puro comes with three environments by default:
$> puro ls
[i] Environments:
* stable (not installed)
beta (not installed)
master (not installed)
Use `puro create <name>` to create an environment, or `puro use <name>` to switch
The asterisk next to stable tells us it's the global default, we can invoke it with the puro flutter command:
$> puro flutter --version
Flutter 3.7.0 • channel stable • https://github.com/flutter/flutter.git
Framework • revision b06b8b2710 (4 days ago) • 2023-01-23 16:55:55 -0800
Engine • revision b24591ed32
Tools • Dart 2.19.0 • DevTools 2.20.1
Running that command automatically installed the default environment and invoked the flutter tool, great!
Switching the default
We can switch the default with puro use -g:
This also updates a symlink at ~/.puro/envs/default to point to ~/.puro/envs/beta, which is added to the PATH
automatically during installation:
$> flutter --version
Flutter 3.7.0-1.5.pre • channel beta • https://github.com/flutter/flutter.git
Framework • revision 099b3f4bf1 (7 days ago) • 2023-01-20 18:35:12 -0800
Engine • revision 45c5586f2a
Tools • Dart 2.19.0 (build 2.19.0-444.6.beta) • DevTools 2.20.1
Running puro ls again shows the versions we installed and the new default:
$> puro ls
[i] Environments:
stable (stable / 3.7.0 / b06b8b2710)
* beta (beta / 3.7.0-1.5.pre / 099b3f4bf1)
master (not installed)
Switching specific projects
The puro use command switches the environment of the current project:
You may notice this command creates a .puro.json, this file tells Puro which environment to use, and is automatically
gitignored:
Puro will detect VSCode and Android Studio (IntelliJ) configuration files and adjust them to use the right version of
Dart and Flutter, you can manually control this behavior with --intellij --vscode or --no-intellij --no-vscode.
To ignore the global and project defaults, you can pass -e <name> to most commands:
$> puro -e stable flutter --version
Flutter 3.7.0 • channel stable • https://github.com/flutter/flutter.git
Framework • revision b06b8b2710 (4 days ago) • 2023-01-23 16:55:55 -0800
Engine • revision b24591ed32
Tools • Dart 2.19.0 • DevTools 2.20.1
Finding versions
The puro releases command prints recent releases on the stable and beta channels:
$> puro releases
[i] Latest stable releases:
Flutter 3.7.0 | 3d | b06b8b2710 | Dart 2.19.0
Flutter 3.3.10 | 1mo | 135454af32 | Dart 2.18.6
Flutter 3.3.9 | 2mo | b8f7f1f986 | Dart 2.18.5
Flutter 3.3.8 | 3mo | 52b3dc25f6 | Dart 2.18.4
Flutter 3.3.7 | 3mo | e99c9c7cd9 | Dart 2.18.4
Flutter 3.0.5 | 7mo | f1875d570e | Dart 2.17.6
Flutter 2.10.5 | 9mo | 5464c5bac7 | Dart 2.16.2
Flutter 2.8.1 | 1y | 77d935af4d | Dart 2.15.1
Flutter 2.5.3 | 1y | 18116933e7 | Dart 2.14.4
Flutter 2.2.3 | 2y | f4abaa0735 | Dart 2.13.4
Latest beta releases:
Flutter 3.7.0-1.5.pre | 4d | 099b3f4bf1 | Dart 2.19.0
Flutter 3.7.0-1.4.pre | 2w | 686fe913dc | Dart 2.19.0
Flutter 3.7.0-1.3.pre | 3w | 9b4416aaa7 | Dart 2.19.0
Flutter 3.7.0-1.2.pre | 1mo | c29b09b878 | Dart 2.19.0
Flutter 3.7.0-1.1.pre | 2mo | e599f02c7a | Dart 2.19.0
Flutter 3.6.0-0.1.pre | 2mo | 75927305ff | Dart 2.19.0
Flutter 3.4.0-34.1.pre | 4mo | 71520442d4 | Dart 2.19.0
Flutter 3.3.0-0.5.pre | 5mo | 096162697a | Dart 2.18.0
Flutter 3.1.0 | 8mo | bcea432bce | Dart 2.18.0
Flutter 2.13.0-0.4.pre | 9mo | 25caf1461b | Dart 2.17.0
By default, this command shows the absolute latest 5 releases followed by the latest of the previous 5 major versions.
Pass it --all to show all releases unfiltered.
Creation
The puro create command is used to create new environments.
If you add a release channel, puro will query the latest version on that channel and download it:
You can also create one from a version, commit, or branch like 3.3.6, d9111f6 or Hixie-patch-3.
Forks are supported with the --fork option:
$> puro create my_env --fork [email protected]:pingbird/flutter.git
[✓] Created new environment at `/home/ping/.puro/envs/my_env/flutter`
Deletion
The puro rm command simply deletes environments:
Note that this does not delete any cached data that this environment depends on, this is why re-creating environments after deletion usually takes less than a second.
We can manually delete unused caches with the puro gc command: