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API deployment setup

The Flutter News Toolkit uses Dart Frog to simplify the backend build by aggregating, composing, and normalizing data from multiple sources. You must deploy your Dart Frog API to serve requests to the internet.

Google Cloud​

You can deploy your Dart Frog API to Cloud Run, a managed compute platform that lets you run containers directly on top of Google's scalable infrustructure. To deploy your API to Cloud Run, check out the Dart Frog instructions at Google Cloud Run and review the details below. Also, set up a GitHub Action Service Account to ease the process of authenticating and authorizing GitHub Actions Workflows to Google Cloud.

Deployment Steps​

If you've created a development and production flavor for your application, you'll want two corresponding Google Cloud Projects where the API must be deployed:

  • Development:

    • project_id: example-name-dev

    • service_name : example-name-api-dev

  • Production:

    • project_id: example-name-prod

    • service_name : example-name-api-prod

Every time a change is made inside the API, a new version must be deployed to Cloud Run for both GCP projects. To do so, follow the steps below:

  1. Make sure you have the Google Cloud SDK installed and configured.

  2. Make sure you have the Dart SDK and the Dart Frog packages installed and configured.

  3. Login into the GCP account using the gcloud auth login command, selecting the email account that has access to your project's GCP accounts.

  4. Run the gcloud config set project <project_id> command to set the project to be one of the app's projects.

  5. Open a terminal inside the api folder, and run the dart_frog build command. This will create a /build directory with all the files needed to deploy the API.

  6. Run the following command to deploy the API to Cloud Run:

    gcloud run deploy [service_name]  \

    --source build \

    --project=[project_id] \

    --region=us-central \

    --allow-unauthenticated

    Note: the --allow-unauthenticated is needed because the api can be publicly accessed.

  7. If the deploy was made to the already existing service (by using the service_name values provided above), the URL will be the same as the previous version. Otherwise, it must be updated as API_BASE_URL inside the launch.json file of the project.

note

You can optionally configure API authentication and user authentication for your API, if desired.

Other​

You can also deploy your Dart Frog API to other services, like AWS App Runner or Digital Ocean App Platform.

Accessing your API​

By default, your app expects to receive news data from localhost. In order to receive data from your deployed API, you must point your app towards your new URL.

note

If you're using an android emulator, you must set http://10.0.2.2:8080 as the baseUrl instead of http://localhost:8080.

Create a new ApiClient class that extends FlutterNewsExampleApiClient and set the baseUrl field to your new API URL. Additionally, override any FlutterNewsExampleApiClient methods which diverge from your API request schema, and implement them to handle the request appropriately.

Finally, edit the main_flavor.dart file for every app flavor you want receiving data from your deployed API. Remove the assignment of apiClient to FlutterNewsExampleApiClient.localhost and assign apiClient to an instance of your new API client. For example:

final apiClient = YourNewsApiClient(
    tokenProvider: tokenStorage.readToken,
    baseURL: 'https://yourApiBaseURL',
);