Upgrading Flutter

No matter which one of the Flutter release channels you follow, you can use the flutter command to upgrade your Flutter SDK or the packages that your app depends on.

Upgrading the Flutter SDK

To update the Flutter SDK use the flutter upgrade command:

$ flutter upgrade

This command gets the most recent version of the Flutter SDK that’s available on your current Flutter channel.

If you are using the stable channel and want an even more recent version of the Flutter SDK, switch to the beta channel using flutter channel beta, and then run flutter upgrade.

Keeping informed

We publish migration guides for known breaking changes.

We send announcements regarding these changes to the Flutter announcements mailing list.

To avoid being broken by future versions of Flutter, consider submitting your tests to our test registry.

Switching Flutter channels

Flutter has two release channels: stable and beta.

The stable channel

We recommend the stable channel for new users and for production app releases. The team updates this channel about every three months. The channel may receive occasional hot fixes for high-severity or high-impact issues.

The continuous integration for the Flutter team’s plugins and packages includes testing against the latest stable release.

The latest documentation for the stable branch is at: https://api.flutter.dev

The beta channel

The beta channel has the latest stable release. This is the most recent version of Flutter that we have heavily tested. This channel has passed all our public testing, has been verified against test suites for Google products that use Flutter, and has been vetted against contributed private test suites. The beta channel receives regular hot fixes to address newly discovered important issues.

The beta channel is essentially the same as the stable channel but updated monthly instead of quarterly. Indeed, when the stable channel is updated, it is updated to the latest beta release.

Other channels

We currently have one other channel, master. People who contribute to Flutter use this channel.

This channel is not as thoroughly tested as the beta and stable channels.

We do not recommend using this channel as it is more likely to contain serious regressions.

The latest documentation for the master branch is at: https://master-api.flutter.dev

Changing channels

To view your current channel, use the following command:

$ flutter channel

To change to another channel, use flutter channel <channel-name>. Once you’ve changed your channel, use flutter upgrade to download the latest Flutter SDK and dependent packages for that channel. For example:

$ flutter channel beta
$ flutter upgrade

Upgrading packages

If you’ve modified your pubspec.yaml file, or you want to update only the packages that your app depends upon (instead of both the packages and Flutter itself), then use one of the flutter pub commands.

To update to the latest compatible versions of all the dependencies listed in the pubspec.yaml file, use the upgrade command:

$ flutter pub upgrade

To update to the latest possible version of all the dependencies listed in the pubspec.yaml file, use the upgrade --major-versions command:

$ flutter pub upgrade --major-versions

This also automatically update the constraints in the pubspec.yaml file.

To identify out-of-date package dependencies and get advice on how to update them, use the outdated command. For details, see the Dart pub outdated documentation.

$ flutter pub outdated