From Code to Cloud: Deploying your Flutter Application to Globe

Learn how to build, and deploy your Flutter apps effortlessly using Globe CLI.

As a mobile developer interested in building and managing scalable and innovative ideas, you will undoubtedly need to find the right platform to build, deploy, and manage your app, in our case, for this tutorial APIs. In fact, this is quite important after all. No matter how innovative the solutions you build are, if they are never shipped to deployment, they never get recognized.

Globe is a modern, developer-focused platform that promises to simplify this process by offering a seamless infrastructure for Flutter APP deployment and features that cater to scalability, reliability, and developer experience.

In this tutorial, my goal is simple–we’ll play around with Globe by building and deploying an API function. I’ll deploy your Globe and evaluate its performance. We’ll look at the benefits and downsides of using Globe and ways to leverage the best form of its service as developers.

The Globe Developer Experience

Whether you are a flutter developer building your next big thing, exploring new tools and platforms to build on, or a team managing complex microservices, Globe positions itself as an all-in-one solution to streamline DevOps workflows out of the box. Plus, it gives you a Dashboard to help you keep track of and know everything about your app.

Globe sets a high standard when creating a smooth developer experience by focusing on ease of use, detailed documentation, and a thoughtfully designed dashboard. Here’s a breakdown of what makes deploying with Globe a developer-friendly process:

Here are some key developer Features Globe offers on deployment

1. Automatic load balancing and scaling
2. Built-in CI/CD
3. Logging
4. Usage statistics & analytics
5. Advanced caching algorithms for Flutter Web deployments
6. Zero-config by default.

1. Automatic load balancing and scaling: Load balancing is a method adopted by modern apps to allow a network of distributed servers to manage the traffic of application requests. In simple terms, it manages a heavy traffic volume across multiple servers after deploying an application.
   This task usually requires the expertise of a DevOps team or engineering team engineers. It's a very important part of shipping an app to production because it reduces the chances of overloading your servers. When deploying with the Globe, this feature is provided out of the box, eliminating the need for manual configuration.

2. Built-in continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD): Every developer dreams of progressively updating their application, ensuring it remains secure from development to production and that every version release is monitored and controlled without any headaches in between. Globe allows you to maintain a secure CI/CD pipeline from Github.

3. Logging: Building a Flutter application means that, naturally, you’re working on an application with a lot of moving parts. In order to be able to monitor all these moving parts, you need to iterate some sort of logging tool. Deploying your application on Globe gives you a logging solution that helps you keep track of events, errors, and performance issues in real-time, providing valuable insights for debugging and improving the app’s reliability, which makes it incredibly helpful when debugging.

4. Usage statistics & analytics: Knowing the state of your application at every time is also an important feature Globe offers on deployments. You get to monitor the performance of your application at every point using advanced analytics tools provided on your Dashboard.

5. Advanced caching algorithms: Globes offers an advanced feature for Flutter web apps, building upon the concept of service workers and caching strategies. It provides a more fine-tuned approach to optimizing performance and resource management dynamics over caching and adds greater control over cache expiration and data updates.

6. Zero-config by Default: Unlike other deployment applications where you have to create a file or add configuration snippets. Globe allows you to deploy your application by running three commands using the Globe CLI (command line interface).

Evaluating Globe: Strengths and Areas for Improvement

After experimenting with this tool, here are some strengths and areas for improvement I found out when using Globe:

Strengths

• CLI Tool for Automated Deployment: Globe offers a CLI that allows you to automate deployments easily. This means developers can integrate Globe’s deployment process into their GitHub actions workflow, allowing for automated, consistent deployments whenever changes are pushed to their repositories.
• Easy Integration with GitHub Actions: Globe’s CLI tool also makes integrating with GitHub action workflows easy, allowing developers to create a seamless CI/CD pipeline for deploying their apps.
• Scalability and Flexibility: Globe’s platform is designed to handle deploying a wide range of flutter applications, from small projects to large-scale enterprise solutions. Whether you’re deploying a counter app or a full-functioning mobile game, Globe gives you the flexibility to support your deployment needs.
• Simple and User-friendly Setup: Globe offers an intuitive setup process that allows you to get started quickly without having to deal with complicated configurations. The user-friendly experience saves you a lot of time learning as a beginner or an expert, meaning you can get started configuring your apps for deployment.

Areas of Improvements

• Lack of pre-built GitHub action: Unlike other platforms (e.g., Vercel, Firebase), Globe currently does not offer a suite of pre-built GitHub Actions for CI/CD tasks like linting, testing, or building. This means developers will need to manually create these workflows, which can be time-consuming and error-prone, especially for teams that aren’t familiar with setting up these custom workflows.
• Limited Support for Advanced CI/CD Features: The Globe offers advanced CI/CD and analytics features. It lacks support for more advanced CI/CD features (such as automatic rollbacks on deployment failure or advanced versioning control). This means you or someone on your team still needs to have enough experience with DevOps technology and tooling these custom features themselves to fill the gap.
• Limited Version Control System Support: Globe currently only supports Github for version control, which means that companies using version control systems like GitLab, or Bitbucket have a appeal limit. They have to consider other options or perhaps migrating to github, or maybe even meaning codebase across 2 version control platforms.
• Limited Ecosystem and Documentation: Even with all its amazon features, Globe;s ecosystem and documentation might is not as expensive as other widely used platforms like Firebase, and AWS.

Deploying your Flutter app to Globe

Now we’ve got the big picture of the features Globe offers, Lets deploy a Flutterwave starter app and see how it works.

1. Head over to your project directory or workspace and run the dart pub global activate globe_cli on your terminal to install the Globe CLI.
   

2. Enter the command globe login. You’ll be redirected to your browser to complete the login process. You’ll get the following response.
   

3. Finally, run the Command globe deploy, you’ll get a prompt to specify your project directory in this case ./ , and to enter your project name, Flutter_demo. You will then get a response like the one below.
   

Click on the link, and voila, your app is deployed
Head over to your Globe account, and you’ll find your newly deployed app.

You can also decide to deploy your application directly from GitHub by choosing the `import from GitHub' option on your Globe dashboard.

Wrapping Up

Now that you’ve explored how Globe works, its key features and the areas where it can improve, you’ve also taken a hands-on approach by deploying your Flutter application using the Globe CLI. This tutorial demonstrates just how intuitive and straightforward the process can be.

Whether you’re an experienced developer or just starting your deployment journey, Globe offers a streamlined, user-friendly experience that caters to a variety of development needs. With Globe, you can confidently build, deploy, and scale your Flutter projects with ease.

Ready to get started with Globe and take your projects even further? Explore our other tutorials and unlock the full potential of Globe!

• Deleting Project with Globe
• Plausible Projects with Globe
• Setting up CI with Globe CLI