Host your Flutter Project as a REST API

After you build your flutter project you may want to reuse the models and business logic from your lib folder. I will show you how to go about setting up the project to have iOS, Android, Web, Windows, MacOS, Linux and a REST API interface with one project. The REST API can also be deploy to Google Cloud Run for Dart everywhere.

One Codebase for Client and Sever.

This will allow you to expose your Dart models as a REST API and run your business logic from your lib folder while the application runs the models as they are. Here is the final project.

Setting Up 

As with any Flutter project I am going to assume that you already have Flutter installed on your machine and that you can create a project. This is a intermediate level difficulty so read on if you are up to the challenge. You will also need to know the basics of Docker.

Why one project? 

It may not be obvious but when building complex applications you will at some point have a server and an application that calls that server. Firebase is an excellent option for doing this and I use it in almost all my projects. Firebase Functions are really powerful but you are limited by Javascript or Typescript. What if you could use the same packages that you are using in the Flutter project, or better yet what if they both used the same?