What is the best way to tell whether pub get needs running for a project?

[DanTup]

I'd like to detect when a user opens a project in Dart Code that is missing packages (eg. it's a fresh clone and they've never run pub get) and prompt them, with an easy button to do it (since otherwise they'll get a screenfull of errors).

What's the best way to do this? I see that pub get has a --dry-run option, but I don't know if it's safe to use. Eg.:

• Is it safe to run in any folder (might not be a dart project root, might be a Flutter or Fuchsia project)
• Can I rely on specific output (it doesn't look like it's designed to be machine parseable - would you consider a flag to make it?)
• Is it fast, or does it go over the network for things?

[zoechi]

I guess one thing is to check if the .packages and pubspec.lock files exists.
pub serve also does a check if dependencies in pubspec.yaml were modified after the last time pub get or pub upgrade were run, but I don't know how they do that exactly.
You could also check the source of the IntelliJ plugin, because they show a hint to update as well when dependencies in pubspec.yaml were updated. Just comparing file dates isn't enough, because requiring to run pub get every time for example transformer settings were modified is too cumbersome.

[DanTup]

Ideally I'd like to avoid adding my own logic for this (to avoid it not matching, or needing maintaining) =)

[DanTup]

For now we're chekcing if .packages is missing or older than pubspec.yaml. It's not foolproof but is apparently what IntelliJ does and you can disable it globally, per-workspace or per-folder if you have a project that works in a way that this doesn't work (eg. the SDK repo).

[sigurdm]

@DanTup
Did we land on something useful here? Can this issue be closed?

[DanTup]

I don't think anything specific has been done here, but there's a similar issue at #1447 that's a bit more specific and has more recent discussion so I don't think we need both.