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macOS

Instructions for packaging a Flet app into a macOS application bundle.

See complementary information here.

Prerequisites#

Rosetta 2#

Flutter, which we use for packaging, requires Rosetta 2 on Apple Silicon: 

sudo softwareupdate --install-rosetta --agree-to-license

Xcode#

Xcode 15 or later to compile native Swift or ObjectiveC code.

CocoaPods#

CocoaPods 1.16 or later to compile and enable Flutter plugins.

flet build macos#

Note

This command can be run on a macOS only.

Creates a macOS application bundle from your Flet app.

Bundle architecture#

By default, flet build macos command builds universal app bundle that works on both Apple Silicon and older Intel processors. Therefore, packaging utility will try to download Python binary wheels for both arm64 and x86_64 platforms. Recent releases of some popular packages do not include x86_64 wheels anymore, so the entire packaging operation will fail.

You can limit the build command to specific architectures only, by using --arch option. For example, to build macOS app bundle that works on Apple Silicon only use the following command:

flet build macos --arch arm64

[tool.flet.macos]
target_arch = ["arm64"] # (1)!
  1. This setting can be a list (for one or more targets) or a string (for one target).

TBD: list some common/supported archs

Entitlements#

Key-value pairs that grant an executable permission to use a service or technology. Supported entitlements are defined in Apple Developer Entitlements Reference.

They can be set as follows:

flet build --macos-entitlements "key"=value

[tool.flet.macos]
entitlement."key" = value

[tool.flet.macos.entitlement]
"key" = value

They get written into specific .entitlements files.

Default values

Below is a list of default entitlements:

[tool.flet.macos.entitlement]
"com.apple.security.app-sandbox" = false
"com.apple.security.cs.allow-jit" = true
"com.apple.security.network.client" = true
"com.apple.security.network.server" = true