Flutter Lints Error Solved

Flutter lints are a set of rules that help you write better code for your Flutter apps, packages, and plugins. They are recommended by the Flutter team and the Dart community, and they can help you avoid common errors, improve performance, and follow best practices. However, if you don’t enable them properly in your project, you might encounter some errors or warnings from the Dart analyzer. In this article, I will show you how to solve one of the most common errors related to Flutter lints: 

The include file package:flutter_lints/flutter.yaml in /analysis_options.yaml cannot be found.





What causes this error?

This error occurs when you try to use the Flutter lints package in your project, but you don’t have it as a dependency in your pubspec.yaml file. The Flutter lints package is a separate package from the Flutter framework, and it contains the latest set of recommended lints for Flutter projects¹. To use it, you need to add it as a dev dependency in your pubspec.yaml file, like this:

dev_dependencies:
  flutter_lints: ^2.0.0

##Then, you need to run  flutter pub get   ## to download the package and its dependencies.

How to fix this error?

After adding the Flutter lints package as a dev dependency, you need to create an analysis_options.yaml file in the root directory of your project (next to the pubspec.yaml file) with the following content:

include: package:flutter_lints/flutter.yaml

This line tells the Dart analyzer to use the lints defined in the package:flutter_lints/flutter.yaml file, which is included in the Flutter lints package. This file contains two sets of lints: core lints and flutter lints². The core lints are the ones that help identify critical issues that are likely to lead to problems when running or consuming Dart code³. The flutter lints are the ones that are specific to Flutter development, such as using const constructors, avoiding print statements, and following naming conventions.

By including this line in your analysis_options.yaml file, you enable both sets of lints for your project. You can also customize the lints by adding or removing rules from the file, or by overriding some of the options.

How to check for lint issues?

Once you have enabled and configured the Flutter lints for your project, you can check for lint issues by opening your project in an IDE with Dart support, such as VS Code or Android Studio. You will see squiggly lines under the code that violates the lint rules, and you can hover over them to see the details and suggestions. You can also run flutter analyze on the command line to see a summary of the lint issues in your project. You may be able to fix some of the issues automatically by running 

dart fix --apply on the command line.

Conclusion

Flutter lints are a great way to improve your code quality and consistency for your Flutter projects. However, they require some setup and configuration to work properly. In this article, I showed you how to solve one of the most common errors related to Flutter lints:

The include file package:flutter_lints/flutter.yaml in /analysis_options.yaml cannot be found. 

I hope this article was helpful and informative for you. If you have any questions or feedback, feel free to leave a comment below. Happy coding!