pub-upgrade.md

title	description
dart pub upgrade	Use dart pub upgrade to get the latest versions of all dependencies used by your Dart app.

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 A related command is dart pub outdated, which you can run to find out-of-date dependencies.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.

Upgrading specific dependencies

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!

Usually, no other dependencies are upgraded; 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.

This means that upgrading a specific dependency does not by default upgrade its transitive dependencies.

To upgrade a specific dependency and all its transitive dependencies to their latest versions use the --unlock-transitive flag.

$ dart pub upgrade --unlock-transitive test args

Getting a new dependency

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.

Removing a dependency

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.

Upgrading while offline

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.

Options

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

--[no-]offline

{% render 'tools/pub-option-no-offline.md' %}

--dry-run or -n

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.

--[no-]precompile

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

--major-versions

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.

:::tip Commit the pubspec.yaml file before running this command, so that you can undo the changes if necessary. :::

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

--tighten

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.

--unlock-transitive

When used with a list of packages to unlock, first the transitive closure of those packages' dependencies (in the current resolution) is computed, and then all those packages are unlocked.

In a workspace

In a Pub workspace dart pub upgrade will upgrade all dependencies in the shared resolution from across all workspace packages.

dart pub upgrade --major-versions and dart pub upgrade --tighten will update constraints in all workspace pubspec.yaml files.

{% render 'pub-problems.md' %}