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December 2, 2023In the world of fast-paced mobile app development, being able to scale up your codebase is essential. Flutter has a reputation for high-performance apps and great UI across platforms. But as your code and app grow in complexity, dependency management will become an issue you have to deal with sooner or later. Dependency Injection (DI) has been a huge lifesaver in software engineering. There are several packages available in the Flutter ecosystem to help you manage yours, and get_it is a popular choice.
How Does Dependency Injection Work?
Dependency Injection is a software design pattern that allows classes to receive their dependencies from an external source instead of creating them internally. It encourages modular architecture, which makes your code easier to read, maintain and test. Doing this manually in Flutter can be quite tricky as it requires setting up a centralized place where dependencies can be registered and managed.
Understand how these dependencies are managed and injected. This will help you write code around them. This is especially helpful if you want a large-scale application where manual dependency management would not be possible.
Set up DI in Flutter
To successfully implement DI, you need to follow the right practices. SOLID design principles state that modules should be based on abstractions rather than concrete implementations. This strategy is the foundation for an effective DI implementation.
Using get_it for Streamlined Management
When it comes to service location for Dart and Flutter projects, get_it is second to none. For such a simple and flexible tool, it does offer an easy way to implement Dependency Injection. Developers are especially fond of this package because it eliminates a lot of boilerplate code associated with manual DI implementation by centralizing registration and retrieval of dependencies. You can now write concise, readable code without all lines tangled together.
In addition to easier maintenance and testing, overall app development also speeds up. This is because developers spend more time building functionality rather than managing dependencies. Rather than always taking up space like other instances, get_it only creates one when needed thanks to its lazy singleton instantiation support feature — saving resources both at runtime and compile-time with its lazy loading approach. This helps optimize resource usage while improving app performance.
Lastly, developers can configure dependencies as singletons or factory instances when controlling the lifecycle of them. This makes it ideal for building scalable apps that can adapt to new requirements over time.

DI Leads to Successful Projects
Complex but Worth It
But let’s be honest: DI isn’t the simplest concept in the world. It’s got some complexity to it, no doubt about that. Luckily for you though, there are ways to make things easier on yourself. In Flutter for example, using packages like get_it can simplify DI significantly. So instead of being overwhelmed by the process every time DI comes up in a project (which will probably be often), take the shortcut and use this package right off the bat. You’ll be thankful later when you’re not trying to read through a 15 page stackoverflow thread on how to do something simple.
