How to automatically upgrade Flutter dependencies

Question

My Flutter project has a dependency flutter_dotenv at version ^2.0.1 and I want to automatically upgrade to the new version ^2.0.2.

I am running the following command to upgrade it:

flutter pub upgrade

Reference: Upgrading packages only

To update to the latest compatible versions of all the dependencies listed in the pubspec.yaml file, use the upgrade command:

flutter pub upgrade

However nothing seems to happen. pubspec.yaml does not change, and the console output does not mention of a new version (which would be enough).

My pubspec.yaml looks like this:

environment:
  sdk: ">=2.1.0 <3.0.0"

dependencies:
  flutter:
    sdk: flutter
  flutter_dotenv: ^2.0.1
  cupertino_icons: ^0.1.2

dev_dependencies:
  flutter_test:
    sdk: flutter

flutter:
  uses-material-design: true

Answer 1

Flutter automatically upgrades non-breaking changes based on semantic versioning. You wouldn't want breaking changes to be automatic. The updates are reflected in pubspec.lock, but not pubspec.yaml.

There are a couple IDE plugins that can help you to upgrade packages more easily than looking them up one by one on pub.dev.

Android Studio

Flutter Pub Version Checker

This plugin highlights any dependencies in pubspec.yaml you have that are out of date so that you can choose to update them if you want to.

Visual Studio Code

Pubspec Assist

This plugin makes it super simple to add or update a dependency without going to pub.dev, but you still have to check them one at a time.