Why adding flet only to dev dependencies?

[asmaier]

The documentation at https://flet.dev/docs/getting-started/ suggest to add flet[all] only to the dev dependencies of a poetry or uv project. Why is that? Is flet not a necessary dependency at runtime?

[FeodorFitsner]

Of course, flet dependency is required in runtime.

The idea was user moving to the next step: https://flet.dev/docs/getting-started/create-flet-app where they run flet create which replaces pyproject.toml from a template, which contains proper dependencies.

Does it make sense? Or it's confusing and we need to explicitly ask for adding flet dep as well?

[asmaier]

Now that you explained it to me, it makes sense. But I have a bit different use case: I have an existing app with command line interface. Now I would like to add a GUI to it using flet. So I would like to add flet as dependency to an existing project managed by uv. I cannot call flet create, because that would delete my existing pyproject.toml.

I think it would be nice if the documentation would add a section on how to add flet to an existing project. I guess that would go like

uv add flet             # runtime dependencies
uv add flet[all] --dev  # additional tools for developing and packaging flet apps

Correct?

[asmaier]

Ok, I see that was wrong. It seems I have to do

uv add "flet[desktop]" "flet[cli]" 

so that I can run my app via

uv run --no-dev flet run src/<packagename>/main.py

If I only added flet[desktop]I got the error:

Installing flet-cli 0.27.3 package...Unable to upgrade "flet-cli" package to version 0.27.3. Please use "pip install 'flet[all]==0.27.3' --upgrade" command to upgrade Flet.

I think all these extra options for the flet package are a bit confusing and should be explained better in the documentation.

[asmaier]

I think my answer before wasn't quite correct. I figured out a bit more from

• Flet packages and extras - new ways to install Flet tools and dependencies #4227
• https://github.com/flet-dev/flet/blob/main/sdk/python/packages/flet/pyproject.toml

If you want to build an desktop app (windows, macos) you have to add

uv add "flet[desktop]"     # runtime dependencies
uv add "flet[cli]" --dev.  # commandline tools for development

If you want to develop a web app you have to do

uv add "flet[web]"         # runtime dependencies
uv add "flet[cli]" --dev.  # commandline tools for development

What I still don't understand: What do you have to include if you want to develop a mobile app for iOS or Android?