dart pub upgrade

Upgrade is one of the commands of the pub tool.

$ dart pub upgrade [options] [dependencies]

Like dart pub get, dart pub upgrade gets dependencies. The difference is that dart pub upgrade ignores any existing lockfile, so that pub can get the latest versions of all dependencies. A related command is dart pub outdated, which you can run to find out-of-date dependencies.

Without any additional arguments, dart pub upgrade gets the latest versions of all the dependencies listed in the pubspec.yaml file in the current working directory, as well as their transitive dependencies. For example:

$ dart pub upgrade
Dependencies upgraded!

When dart pub upgrade upgrades dependency versions, it writes a lockfile to ensure that dart pub get will use the same versions of those dependencies. For application packages, check in the lockfile to source control; this ensures the application has the exact same versions of all dependencies for all developers and when deployed to production. For regular packages, don't check in the lockfile, because packages are expected to work with a range of dependency versions.

If a lockfile already exists, dart pub upgrade ignores it and generates a new one from scratch, using the latest versions of all dependencies.

See the dart pub get documentation for more information on package resolution and the system package cache.

You can tell dart pub upgrade to upgrade specific dependencies to the latest version while leaving the rest of the dependencies alone as much as possible. For example:

$ dart pub upgrade test args
Dependencies upgraded!

Upgrading a dependency upgrades its transitive dependencies to their latest versions as well. Usually, no other dependencies are updated; they stay at the versions that are locked in the lockfile. However, if the requested upgrades cause incompatibilities with these locked versions, they are selectively unlocked until a compatible set of versions is found.

If a dependency is added to the pubspec before dart pub upgrade is run, it gets the new dependency and any of its transitive dependencies. This shares the same behavior as dart pub get.

If a dependency is removed from the pubspec before dart pub upgrade is run, the dependency is no longer available for importing. Any transitive dependencies of the removed dependency are also removed, as long as no remaining immediate dependencies also depend on them. This is the same behavior as dart pub get.

If you don't have network access, you can still run dart pub upgrade. Because pub downloads packages to a central cache shared by all packages on your system, it can often find previously downloaded packages without needing to use the network.

However, by default, dart pub upgrade tries to go online if you have any hosted dependencies, so that pub can detect newer versions of dependencies. If you don't want pub to do that, pass it the --offline flag. In offline mode, pub looks only in your local package cache, trying to find a set of versions that work with your package from what's already available.

Keep in mind that pub generates a lockfile. If the only version of some dependency in your cache happens to be old, offline dart pub upgrade locks your app to that old version. The next time you are online, you will likely want to run dart pub upgrade again to upgrade to a later version.

The dart pub upgrade command supports the dart pub get options, and more. For options that apply to all pub commands, see Global options.

By default, pub connects to the network to retrieve hosted packages (--no-offline). To use cached packages instead, use --offline. For details, see Getting while offline.

Reports the dependencies that would be changed, but doesn't make the changes. This is useful if you want to analyze updates before making them.

By default, pub precompiles executables in immediate dependencies (--precompile). To prevent precompilation, use --no-precompile.

Gets the packages that dart pub outdated lists as resolvable, ignoring any upper-bound constraint in the pubspec.yaml file. Also updates pubspec.yaml with the new constraints.

To check which dependencies will be upgraded, you can use dart pub upgrade --major-versions --dry-run.

Updates the lower bounds of dependencies in pubspec.yaml to match the resolved versions, and returns a list of the changed constraints. Can be applied to specific dependencies.

Unless stated otherwise, the documentation on this site reflects Dart 3.5.3. Page last updated on 2024-05-13. View source or report an issue.