Writing this thing because its a pain setting up the repo + the docs are outdated.

  1. Make sure that you don’t have any flutter executable in your PATH.

  2. Install python3 git depot_tools Visual Studio 2017Windows 10 SDK` (required for non-Googlers only). Make sure to install the “Debugging Tools for Windows” feature.

  3. git clone https://github.com/flutter/flutter.git

  4. cd flutter

  5. git remote rename origin upstream

  6. Fork flutter and change the origin to your fork: git remote add origin [email protected]:\/flutter.git

  7. Add flutter/bin to PATH.

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  1. make sure flutter is in your PATH where.exe flutter you'd might need to restart your terminal

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Setting up the engine development environment

  1. Add these to your env vars:
    • DEPOT_TOOLS_WIN_TOOLCHAIN=0
    • GYP_MSVS_OVERRIDE_PATH=C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio\2022\Community (make sure the path is correct)
  2. cd flutter/engine
  3. cp .\scripts\standard.gclient ../.gclient copy to root folder (before engine)
  4. cd ../ and run gclient sync
  5. Flutter has a tool for building the engine called et. Add it to PATH: C:\Users\temp\Desktop\flutter\engine\src\flutter\bin
  6. cd into flutter/engine and run et build to build the engine. (make sure et is in your PATH)
  7. Go make some ☕️ 🕐
  8. In the mean time, you can configure your VS Code C++ LSP. I suggest that you first disable Dart and Flutter extensions in order to avoid them running commands you don’t want.
  9. What should be done is:
    1. Open Code in flutter/engine and make sure you have the ms-vscode.cpptools extension installed.
    2. Configure VS Code to use compile_commands.json, which should be in C:\Users\temp\Desktop\flutter\engine\src\out\host_debug.

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  1. After several years et build should finish successfully, if not, don't start making changes you'd regret that later.
  2. Implement your patches and create a PR on Flutter. Remember that Flutter's team requires signed commits… ___ ### Running Flutter projects with your custom engine

as per flutter docs on GH you should use et run inside your project (as if it was flutter run ) although for some reason it didn't worked for me, so I instead ran the et tool directly like so
ps
dart C:\Users\temp\Desktop\flutter\engine\src\flutter\tools\engine_tool\bin\et.dart run