Using Google Cloud

Dart servers can use many Google Cloud products, often with the help of the pre-packaged Docker Official Images for Dart. To get started creating HTTP servers with Dart, check out some of the popular server frameworks.

For information about other Google APIs (including Firebase) that you might want to use from Dart code, see the Google APIs page.

To run Dart in the Cloud, we recommend using serverless computing solutions.

You can use Cloud Run's flexible container support, combined with Dart's Docker images, to run server-side Dart code. Scalable, high-performance APIs and event-driven apps are good use cases for the Cloud Run serverless platform, which frees developers from managing infrastructure.

Examples of Dart servers implemented to run on Cloud Run are in the dart-lang/samples/repo.

For more information about using Cloud Run, see the documentation for building and deploying a service in other languages.

Write Cloud Functions for Firebase using Dart to enable full-stack development, reuse code between your client and backend, and respond to Firebase triggers. To get started, see the Cloud Functions for Firebase documentation.

Firebase Functions package

The core package to write backend functions and APIs in Dart.

Firebase Admin SDK package

Access Firebase services securely from backend servers or Cloud Functions. Use it to manage data, send notifications, or verify authentication tokens.

Firebase Functions for Dart repository

GitHub repository with quickstart guides, examples, and source code.

When running server-side Dart on Google Cloud, consider your architectural needs:

• Choose Cloud Functions for Firebase if you're building backends for Flutter apps that require serverless event handling, lightweight HTTP or callable APIs, or tight integration with Firebase Authentication and Cloud Firestore without managing containers.
• Choose Cloud Run if you need custom Docker containers, long-running processes, WebSocket connections (such as with Serverpod), or custom networking configurations.

Depending on your needs, you might also want to consider running Dart on the following Google Cloud compute platforms.

To run Dart code on Compute Engine, use Compute Engine's support for running containers, combined with Dart's Docker images.

For more information, see the Compute Engine documentation for using software containers.

To run Dart on clusters of Compute Engine instances, use Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE).

For more information, see the GKE overview.

App Engine support for Dart is incomplete and requires the App Engine flexible environment, which does not autoscale to zero instances, so we recommend Cloud Run for new server-side Dart code. If you want to use App Engine, consider using the appengine package.