Flutter and Dart Cookbook

Chapter 8. Adding Assets

In this chapter, we cover the addition of assets to your Flutter application. On many occasions you will want to host local application-based assets. Fortunately, Flutter incorporates a simple mechanism to achieve this through the pubspec.yaml file. You will learn how to:

• Create an assets folder

• Reference an image

• Reference an image folder

• Reference images in your application

• Add fonts to your application

• Import a package

Using assets is another step on the journey to understanding the Flutter environment. From personal experience, I always forget how to add images, so hopefully this will save you from my personal hell.

Adding assets provides a good way to reuse components, which easily extends the general functionality of your application. At the end of this chapter, you should have enough experience to effortlessly perform all of the tasks mentioned above in your future Flutter development journey.

8.1 Using the pubspec.yaml File

Problem

You want to understand what the pubspec.yaml file represents and how best to use it when developing in Flutter.

Solution

The pubspec.yaml file provides a centralized management file for the Flutter environment. In the file is a range of settings that include the SDK version being used, dependencies, assets location, and the name of the application.

Here’s an example of a pubspec.yaml file:

name: sample_app
description: A new Flutter project.

publish_to: 'none' # Remove this line if you wish to publish ...