How to create Flutter tests using Github Actions

Github actions

Github Actions automate your workflow to maintain the app integrity and avoid any code breakage during production.

Creating workflows

• To add workflow to your existing Flutter repository, simply choose Actions.

• Create a new workflow: You’ll see many pre-designed workflows for various services, right from AWS to Kubernetes, depending on the type of repository you are on.

• Click on setup a workflow yourself, and it will create a predefined .yml file. You can even rename your workflow if you’d like.

• Delete the contents of the .yml file and paste the following code below:

name: Flutter Test
on:
  push:
    branches: [ master ]
  pull_request:
    branches: [ master ]

  workflow_dispatch:

jobs:
  build:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest

    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v2
      - uses: actions/setup-java@v2
        with:
          distribution: 'zulu'
          java-version: '11'
      - uses: subosito/flutter-action@v1
        with:
          flutter-version: '2.0.5'

      - name: Get all Flutter Packages
        run: flutter pub get

      - name: Run Flutter Test
        run: flutter test

• In the script above, the name would be your workflow name. The on command handles when the workflow shall be triggered on pushing the code, and pull_request will trigger the workflow when a pull request is triggered.

• In branches, you can specify which branch of the code you would want to reflect the push or pull changes and run the workflow.

• The jobs is where you would define the workflow jobs that would execute it. In our instance, it would run on an Ubuntu machine. The same can be replaced with a Mac, Windows, or even any other Linux OS.

• The steps is the set of steps that it needs in order to execute/install the needed pre-requisites. Here, we are installing Java and a Flutter action that was previously created for GitHub Actions.

• The run will execute the workflow commands. Since we are merely just running the test command to test our Flutter project, we shall just use the flutter test.

• Now, whenever you push or create a pull request from the master branch, the Github workflow will be triggered and would be automatically checking for tests.