Dart

deps-dart provides LSP support for Dart/Flutter projects using the Pub package manager.

Basics

dependencies:
  http: ^1.2.0
  provider: ^6.1.1

Hovering a package’s version constraint shows the latest pub.dev release and whether the constraint is satisfied; an outdated dependency gets an inlay hint and a diagnostic with an “Update to latest version” code action. dependencies, dev_dependencies, and dependency_overrides are all parsed, along with YAML anchor/alias-based section reuse (see below).

Custom/Private Registries (issue #980)

Unlike Cargo/npm/PyPI/Go/NuGet, deps-dart does not fetch version data from a declared custom registry — it only classifies a dependency as DependencySource::CustomRegistry instead of Registry so it stops being queried against the public registry under its real name and stops rendering a misleading public-registry hover link. See Bundler for the equivalent source "..." classification, which shares this same design.

A dependency’s hosted: value — either the hosted: <url> shorthand or the hosted: {name, url} map form — classifies it as CustomRegistry, mirroring Bundler’s source "..." and Cargo’s registry = "..." handling (#248). An explicit hosted: https://pub.dev (or its legacy pub.dartlang.org alias) is recognized as the default registry and stays Registry rather than being misclassified as custom just because hosted: was written out explicitly.

Known limitation: no version data is fetched from the declared custom source — a CustomRegistry dependency gets no hover version list, diagnostics, completion, or code lens, the same degraded-but-honest behavior a declared-but-unqueried registry has always had, just now applied to the correct dependencies instead of silently querying the wrong ones.

Version Comparison

compare_versions previously discarded everything after the first non-digit character in a dot-separated segment, so a prerelease/qualifier version compared as equal to its stable counterpart (2.0.0-beta1 tied with 2.0.0). Dart now applies proper prerelease-aware ordering: SemVer 2.0.0 §11 precedence — numeric identifiers compare numerically, alphanumeric identifiers compare lexically (ASCII), and a version with a prerelease sorts below its base release. Applied both to “latest version” selection (pub.dev’s response order) and to constraint matching, so hover/completion sort order and outdated diagnostics are both corrected.

Unlike SemVer 2.0.0 (and the other ecosystems), pub treats +N build revisions as distinct, ordered releases: 0.8.13 < 0.8.13+1 < 0.8.13+23, with build identifiers ordered like prerelease identifiers and applied after prerelease. A pubspec.lock pin at 0.8.13+1 is therefore reported outdated when pub.dev’s latest is 0.8.13+23, and the newest build revision is selected as latest. See Composer for the equivalent fix in that ecosystem, which shares the same underlying bug class.

YAML Anchor/Alias Resolution

pubspec.yaml supports YAML anchors (&name) and aliases (*name) for sharing structure between sections, e.g. a shared dependencies: block reused via dev_dependencies: *shared_deps. Aliasing an entire dependencies:/dev_dependencies:/ dependency_overrides: section, or an entire environment: mapping (not just its sdk: value), resolves correctly — the aliased dependencies/sdk: constraint appear as if written out in full, including when the same section is aliased more than once.

Known limitation: resolved-via-alias dependencies show no hover, diagnostics, completion, inlay hints, or code lens, since no position in the aliasing occurrence’s own text corresponds to them (only the anchor’s original definition does, which would be misleading and — for a section aliased more than once — ambiguous). They still count toward the document’s dependency total (including the truncation cap), and are visible to anything reading the parsed dependency list. A single dependency’s own value aliasing a whole mapping (pkg: *shared_entry, as opposed to the section or environment: key itself) is not resolved at all — the dependency appears with a real name but no version/source info.