VS Code (OSX) Flutter hot reload is not triggered by save

Edit: This issue has been fixed in VS Code 1.32.2 which is now live. No, it's not fixed in 1.32.2!

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it dosn't work at all for me. I don't see neither loading icon, nor hot-reloaded changes


Edit: This issue has been fixed in VS Code 1.32.2 which is now live.


VS Code 1.32 has a nasty regression that's throwing errors during the debug session launch that's stopping a few things from working.

I would recommend temporarily downgrading to VS Code 1.31 (there are download links at the top of the v1.31 release notes) until the fix is released.

As of Saturday 9th March the fix is in master, it should appear in the Insiders build on Mon 11th March and is planned for a recovery release. I hope it won't take too long to release, it is tagged as important in the issue tracker (I'm not on the VS Code team though!).

Relevant issues:

  • https://github.com/Microsoft/vscode/issues/69534
  • https://github.com/Dart-Code/Dart-Code/issues/1518

I had the same problem. Currently I am using VSCode version 1.39.2.

For the hot reload to work you need to start debugging in VSCode.

As it says in the docs: "Only Flutter apps in debug mode can be hot reloaded." https://flutter.dev/docs/development/tools/hot-reload

You can find that option on the VSCode's top navigation inside Debug or with the shortcut F5.

You don't need to do flutter run on your terminal, nor even on VSCode, is just start debugging and it will launch lib/main.dart in debug mode.

If that doesn't solve the problem, try downgrading to the last version of VSCode.