flet-github-action-workflows

A collection of useful GitHub Action Workflows to ease the building of Flet applications.

Feel free to adapt all the workflows in this repo to your own projects: flet.dev/publish

Video Tutorial

Watch this video I made to get started: https://youtu.be/ObO-D2TD_wo ⬇️

File Structure

As you might know, Flet is a cross-platform framework. This means, from a single codebase you can target multiple platforms: Android (AAB, APK), iOS (IPA), Linux, macOS, Windows, and Web.

The repository contains the following workflows (located in the .github/workflows directory):

File Name	Builds	Runs on
aab-build.yml	Android App Bundle (AAB)	ubuntu-latest
apk-build.yml	Android Application Package (APK)	ubuntu-latest
desktop-and-mobile-builds.yml	desktop [linux, macOS, windows] and mobile [Android (AAB, APK), iOS (IPA)] apps	ubuntu-latest, macos-latest, windows-latest
desktop-build.yml	desktop [Linux, macOS, windows] apps	ubuntu-latest, macos-latest, windows-latest
ipa-build.yml	iOS Package App Store (IPA)	macos-latest
linux-build.yml	linux app	ubuntu-latest
macos-build.yml	macOS app	macos-latest
mobile-builds.yml	mobile [Android (AAB, APK), iOS (IPA)] apps	ubuntu-latest, macos-latest
web-build-and-github-pages-deploy.yml	static web app and deploys it to GitHub Pages	ubuntu-latest
windows-build.yml	windows app	windows-latest

GitHub Actions

All the workflows in this repository are based on GitHub Actions. Read it's documentation to get started. Understanding the syntax will be very useful if you want to customize the workflows to suit your specific needs.

The following actions from the GitHub marketplace are used in one or more of the workflows in this repository:

• actions/checkout: checks-out your repository for use in the workflow
• actions/configure-pages: configures the GitHub Pages action for web deployment
• actions/deploy-page: deploys your static site to GitHub Pages
• actions/setup-python: sets up a Python environment
• actions/setup-java: sets up Java JDK
• actions/upload-artifact: uploads a build artifact for a workflow run

See their respective documentation for more information on how to further customize their execution.

Thanks to their creators!

Usage

• Choose the workflow that suits your needs. For example, if you are building an Linux app, you can choose the linux-build.yml workflow.
• Copy the content of the chosen workflow file.
• Create a new file in your repository under the .github/workflows directory and paste the copied content into it.
• Modify the file as needed. For example, you might want to change the event that triggers the workflow, the name of the workflow, the name of the job, etc. It's up to you.
• Name the file to your liking, but make sure it ends with .yml extension, else it won't be recognized as a workflow file.
• Commit the changes and push them to your repository.
• Go to the Actions tab in your repository. If you haven't modified the file, you should see the workflow running, as a result of a push to main/master branch. Else, you can trigger it manually by clicking on the Run workflow button.

Example

This repo has a branch named example which contains a simple example application which gets built using some of the workflows in this repo.

See the Actions tab of this repository to see the workflows in action.

For Your Information (FYI)

• Customize the build command for your specific needs. Docs: flet.dev/publish

• BUILD_NUMBER and BUILD_VERSION are used for versioning. If you instead prefer defining them in your pyproject.toml, feel free to remove them from the workflow.

• Only flet-cli needs to be installed when building a Flet app. The version to be installed is specified by the FLET_CLI_VERSION environment variable.

• PYTHONUTF8 is set to 1, ensuring that the build outputs are decoded in UTF-8. (useful on Windows)

• FLET_CLI_NO_RICH_OUTPUT and UV_NO_PROGRESS (effective only when using uv) are set to 1 to reduce rich & live output from the build output.

• You might find the below in some of the workflows:

  • workflow_dispatch: used to trigger the workflow manually from the Actions tab

• The below error occured on Linux when flutter doctor was run:

  [✗] Linux toolchain - develop for Linux desktop
      ✗ ninja is required for Linux development.
        It is likely available from your distribution (e.g.: apt install ninja-build), or can be downloaded from https://github.com/ninja-build/ninja/releases
      ✗ GTK 3.0 development libraries are required for Linux development.
        They are likely available from your distribution (e.g.: apt install libgtk-3-dev)
  

  A step named Patch for linux build was added to the linux-related jobs/workflows which resolves this issue by installing the required dependencies.

• The build commands are run in verbose mode (--verbose) to provide detailed information about the build process. This is very useful when you need to report an issue on the Flet repo.

Contribution

You can contribute by adding more workflows, improving the existing ones, or reporting issues you encounter.

Improvements ideas:

• Add a step for releasing the built artifacts to the GitHub releases
• It will be nice if we could take advantage of caching to speed up the builds