Firechat is a simple, extensible chat app powered by Firebase Realtime Database, a cloud-hosted NoSQL database. This version of Firechat is built with Flutter, a new project to help developers build high-performance, high-fidelity, mobile apps for iOS and Android from a single codebase.

This repo is a companion to the Build cross-platform Firebase apps with Flutter codelab. This repo is organized as a series of steps of increasing complexity. If you just want to see the Firechat for Flutter app working, you can run the app in the step_5 directory after you follow the setup instructions below.

To build and run the app in the step_5 directory, you will first need to install Flutter, sign up for a free Firebase account, and configure your app.

Note: If you are following the codelab, then you can skip these setup instructions. The codelab leads you through the setup.

To install Flutter and its dependencies, visit Setup Flutter.

The projects in this repo assume that your checkout of Flutter is in an adjacent directory nammed flutter. If it's somewhere else, you need to edit the path in pubspec.yaml for each of the steps.

Firechat requires Firebase in order to store data. Create a new Firebase project in order to generate a unique project name.

Follow step 12 of the codelab in order to configure this app to connect to your Firebase project.

If you do not properly configure your local copy of the Firechat app to use your new Firebase project, you will likely encounter rate limiting issues.

The codelab guides you through learning the basics of Flutter and connecting it to Firebase. To dive deeper, check out our additional docs:

• Firebase for Flutter API docs
• Flutter API docs

In the directory of the step you want to build, run pub get and flutter run.

Use flutter run --release if you want to remove the "Slow Mode" banner and improve performance.