Introducing: Pub Example Imports

Product Updates  | 

When building Dart & Flutter applications, you’ll most likely be heading over to https://pub.dev to find a package to use within your application. Pub provides an “Example” tab, where developers can showcase some code alongside their package that shows how it works. This is great to see the code; however, there is no quick way to run the example without installing it locally, copying parts of the example, and building it locally, until now.

Pub Imports

We’re super happy to land a new feature on Zapp! which removes this barrier. Pub Imports allow you to quickly checkout any (web compatible) pub package example in seconds, with version support built in.

Once you’ve found your perfect package (maybe it’s the http package?), simply head over to https://zapp.run/pub/<package> and you’ll be presented with the example directly from pub 🎉 For example: https://zapp.run/pub/http.

If you’re looking to try a specific package version, you can also do this too: https://zapp.run/pub/<package>/<version>, e.g. https://zapp.run/pub/http/0.13.4. We feel this is a great way to aid package authors in triaging bugs/issues between releases.

Open in Zapp! Chrome Extension

We’ve also released a Chrome Extension, which adds a handy “Open in Zapp! button alongside any compatible package on pub.dev.

Clicking on this opens a new window to Zapp! with the package example imported and running.

Frequently Asked Questions

How does it work?

Using our new Remote Build Service, we can quickly download the Pub package, extract the example, run pub get, and compile the example – so when you first see it it’s all ready to go and interact with. Check out this tweet for some additional insight into our remote compiler

What if the package doesn’t exist / isn’t compatible?

We’ll show a friendly error message, allowing you to contact the package author or raise an issue on our GitHub repository if you think it should be working.

I’m seeing an “Importing…” message

If the specific package (and version) hasn’t been viewed before, we first import the example, which may take a few moments. Once imported, viewing the package again will be nearly instant.