we should detect the user's PATH env var and use that when we shell out to the flutter tool

[devoncarew]

In many OSes, when the user launches a GUI app from a launcher (OSX dock for example) the shell used is not necessarily the user's default shell. The env variables they had set up won't be visible to that GUI app. When we then shell out to something like the flutter tool, it won't be able to detect the location of the android deve tools, or other things that we'd find on a PATH.

See related (Dart) code here: https://github.com/dart-atom/atom.dart/blob/master/lib/node/process.dart#L190.

[skybrian]

We should also handle the case where the Android dev tools aren't in the user's path at all.

For me, they're not, since I tend to use bash aliases for command I run regularly, instead of adding them to my path. It looks like I did set ANDROID_HOME, though.

[devoncarew]

The flutter command has some functionality for that - flutter config:

Usage: flutter config [arguments]
-h, --help                  Print this usage information.
    --[no-]analytics        Enable or disable reporting anonymously tool usage statistics and crash reports.
    --gradle-dir            The gradle install directory.
    --android-studio-dir    The Android Studio install directory.

[skybrian]

It looks like currently we don't use the PATH or environment variables at all. We find the Flutter SDK from the globally configured Dart SDK, under the assumption that the Dart SDK is in $FLUTTER_HOME/bin/cache/dart-sdk. If it's not, the getFlutterSdk() method returns null. Sometimes we handle that, other times it silently does nothing. [1]

It seems like we want the Flutter SDK and the Dart SDK to be consistent, so we should help the user set their Dart SDK correctly, and then everything works? At least, we need to show an error when the current Dart SDK is not within a Flutter directory, explaining what to change it to.

I'm not sure what the UI for this should look like. What are our options for displaying errors?

(Also, the DartSdk plugin currently doesn't have a per-project Dart SDK setting, but I guess that is fixed in 2017.1 [2])

[1] Code references:
FlutterSdk.getGlobalFlutterSdk() uses DartSdk.getGlobalDartSdk() and getFlutterSdkByDartSdk().

[2] https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/WEB-20870

[skybrian]

It looks like this should be the job of: SdkConfigurationNotificationProvider.createNotificationPanel().

However, I set a breakpoint and changed the Dart SDK, and it didn't stop there.

[devoncarew]

At least, we need to show an error when the current Dart SDK is not within a Flutter directory, explaining what to change it to.

+1!

What are our options for displaying errors?

Some good UI options are showing a toast (an IntelliJ Notification), and displaying a butter bar at the top of the current editor.

Totally correct that IntelliJ isn't using PATH - we're locating relative to the sdk location. But when we shell out to the flutter tool, it using the PATH to discover other dev tools, like adb, the android sdk, ios tools, ... We want to set up PATH for the benefit of that tool, in order to make IntelliJ when launched from an app launcher similar to the behavior a user would see when they run the flutter cli tool or launch IntelliJ from the command-line.

[ScottPierce]

If what's being described here is an inability to access certain environment variables in IntellIj, I've worked around this for years for Android by using launchctl setenv in my ~/.bash_profile. This allows me to run the same commands in IntelliJ terminal as I run in my normal terminal for osx.

launchctl setenv PATH $PATH
launchctl setenv JAVA_HOME $JAVA_HOME
launchctl setenv ANDROID_HOME $ANDROID_HOME
launchctl setenv FLUTTER_ROOT $FLUTTER_ROOT

[devoncarew]

Just for context, many users are hitting this on gitter.

[skybrian]

What is gitter? How do I read more about this?

[devoncarew]

gitter: https://gitter.im/flutter/flutter :)

Just providing context for the amount of impact of the issue -