Overview Docs Community Try Dart Get Dart Dart 2.14 is here, with Apple Silicon support, better tools, and language improvements. Learn more Samples & tutorials Language Core libraries Packages How to use packages Commonly used packages Creating packages Publishing packages Writing package pages Package reference Development Tools & techniques Resources Related sites API reference Blog DartPad (online editor) Flutter Package site Contents Creating a pubspec Getting packages Importing libraries from packages Upgrading a dependency More information How to Reference Pub subcommands Troubleshooting How to use packages The Dart ecosystem uses packages to manage shared software such as libraries and tools. To get Dart packages, you use the pub package manager. You can find publicly available packages on the pub.dev site, or you can load packages from the local file system or elsewhere, such as Git repositories. Wherever your packages come from, pub manages version dependencies, helping you get package versions that work with each other and with your SDK version. Most Dart-savvy IDEs offer support for using pub that includes creating, downloading, updating, and publishing packages. Or you can use dart pub on the command line. At a minimum, a Dart package is a directory containing a pubspec file. The pubspec contains some metadata about the package. Additionally, a package can contain dependencies (listed in the pubspec), Dart libraries, apps, resources, tests, images, and examples. To use a package, do the following: Create a pubspec (a file named pubspec.yaml that lists package dependencies and includes other metadata, such as a version number). Use pub to get your package’s dependencies. If your Dart code depends on a library in the package, import the library. Creating a pubspec The pubspec is a file named pubspec.yaml that’s in the top directory of your application. The simplest possible pubspec lists only the package name: name: my_app Here is an example of a pubspec that declares dependencies on two packages (js and intl) that are hosted on the pub.dev site: name: my_app dependencies: js: ^0.6.0 intl: ^0.15.8 For details on creating a pubspec, see the pubspec documentation and the documentation for the packages that you want to use. Getting packages Once you have a pubspec, you can run dart pub get from the top directory of your application: $ cd <path-to-my_app> $ dart pub get This process is called getting the dependencies. The dart pub get command determines which packages your app depends on, and puts them in a central system cache. If your app depends on a published package, pub downloads that package from the pub.dev site. For a Git dependency, pub clones the Git repository. Transitive dependencies are included, too. For example, if the js package depends on the test package, pub grabs both the js package and the test package. Pub creates a package_config.json file (under the .dart_tool/ directory) that maps each package name that your app depends on to the corresponding package in the system cache. Importing libraries from packages To import libraries found in packages, use the package: prefix: import 'package:js/js.dart' as js; import 'package:intl/intl.dart'; The Dart runtime takes everything after package: and looks it up within the package_config.json file for your app. You can also use this style to import libraries from within your own package. Let’s say that the transmogrify package is laid out as follows: transmogrify/ lib/ transmogrify.dart parser.dart test/ parser/ parser_test.dart The parser_test.dart file can import parser.dart like this: import 'package:transmogrify/parser.dart'; Upgrading a dependency The first time you get a new dependency for your package, pub downloads the latest version of it that’s compatible with your other dependencies. It then locks your package to always use that version by creating a lockfile. This is a file named pubspec.lock that pub creates and stores next to your pubspec. It lists the specific versions of each dependency (immediate and transitive) that your package uses. If your package is an application package, you should check this file into source control. That way, everyone working on your app uses the same versions of all of the packages. Checking in the lockfile also ensures that your deployed app uses the same versions of code. When you’re ready to upgrade your dependencies to the latest versions, use the dart pub upgrade command: $ dart pub upgrade The dart pub upgrade command tells pub to regenerate the lockfile, using the newest available versions of your package’s dependencies. If you want to upgrade only one dependency, you can specify the package to upgrade: $ dart pub upgrade transmogrify That command upgrades transmogrify to the latest version but leaves everything else the same. The dart pub upgrade command can’t always upgrade every package to its latest version, due to conflicting version constraints in the pubspec. To identify out-of-date packages that require editing the pubspec, use dart pub outdated. More information The following pages have more information about packages and the pub package manager. How to Creating packages Publishing packages Reference Pub dependencies Pub environment variables Pub glossary Pub package layout conventions Pub versioning philosophy Pubspec format Pub subcommands The dart pub tool provides the following subcommands: add cache deps downgrade get global outdated publish remove upgrade uploader For an overview of all the dart pub subcommands, see the pub tool documentation. Troubleshooting Troubleshooting pub gives solutions to problems that you might encounter when using pub. Terms Security Privacy Site CC BY 4.0