Flutter theme with Riverpod (2.0 generator)

2 min readJul 23, 2023

In this article, we are going to build a Flutter app that stores a user-selected theme in its settings and allows it to be switched on the fly, using Riverpod 2.0 and a generator.

In brief, the complete example is available on Github https://github.com/awaik/flutter_swith_theme_riverpod

So, let’s get started. Firstly, we need to create a SharedPrefs class to retain the user’s selected theme between app runs.

import 'package:flutter/material.dart';
import 'package:shared_preferences/shared_preferences.dart';

class AppSharedPrefs {
  static AppSharedPrefs? _instance;
  static SharedPreferences? _prefs;

  factory AppSharedPrefs() {
    if (_instance == null) {
      throw Exception('AppSharedPrefs is not initialized. '
          'Please call AppSharedPrefs.ensureInitialized before.');
    }
    return _instance!;
  }

  const AppSharedPrefs._();

  static ensureInitialized() async {
    _prefs ??= await SharedPreferences.getInstance();
    _instance ??= const AppSharedPrefs._();
  }

  static const _themeKey = 'theme';

  ThemeMode themeMode() {
    final themeValue = _prefs!.getInt(_themeKey);
    if (themeValue == null) return ThemeMode.system;

    return ThemeMode.values[themeValue];
  }

  Future<void> updateThemeMode(ThemeMode theme) async {
    await _prefs!.setInt(_themeKey, theme.index);
  }
}

Next, we should initialize Shared Preferencies at the start. We do it by adding one line to the main.dart

await AppSharedPrefs.ensureInitialized();

Next, we create a simple riverpod class, to manage the theme state

import 'package:flashcards/core/shared_prefs/app_shared_prefs.dart';
import 'package:flutter/material.dart';
import 'package:riverpod_annotation/riverpod_annotation.dart';

part 'theme_provider.g.dart';

@riverpod
class ThemeState extends _$ThemeState {
  @override
  ThemeMode build() {
    return AppSharedPrefs().themeMode();
  }

  ThemeMode getTheme() {
    return state;
  }

  void setTheme(ThemeMode mode) {
    state = mode;
    AppSharedPrefs().updateThemeMode(state);
  }
}

and generate providers with the command

 dart run build_runner build --delete-conflicting-outputs

This is pretty much it. But let's dive into what is going on here.

First, we can read the documentation https://docs-v2.riverpod.dev/docs/concepts/about_code_generation and understand different defining a provider syntax. In our case, we use a Class-Based synchronous provider to have the ability to mutate a state.

As we have only one state — we return ThemeMode as a result. But in case we need to manage a lot of states for some screens, we can use ViewModel class with our custom variables and manage complicated states, animations and etc. But this is a topic for a separate article.

So, we made two methods

getTheme — we can use it to get a state once.
setTheme — to change it and save the state to SharedPrefs.

Now is the time to put it into the app. And it is a simple and beautiful code

import 'package:flutter/material.dart';
import 'package:flutter_riverpod/flutter_riverpod.dart';
import 'package:flutter_swith_theme_riverpod/core/shared_prefs/app_shared_prefs.dart';
import 'package:flutter_swith_theme_riverpod/core/theme_state/theme_provider.dart';

void main() async {
  WidgetsFlutterBinding.ensureInitialized();
  await AppSharedPrefs.ensureInitialized();

  runApp(const ProviderScope(child: MyApp()));
}

class MyApp extends ConsumerWidget {
  const MyApp({super.key});

  @override
  Widget build(BuildContext context, WidgetRef ref) {
    final themeMode = ref.watch(themeStateProvider);
    return MaterialApp(
      title: 'Flutter Demo',
      theme: ThemeData(useMaterial3: true),
      darkTheme: ThemeData.dark(useMaterial3: true),
      themeMode: themeMode,
      home: Scaffold(
        appBar: AppBar(
          title: Text(themeMode.name),
        ),
        body: Center(
          child: Column(
            mainAxisAlignment: MainAxisAlignment.center,
            children: <Widget>[
              const Text(
                'The current theme is:',
              ),
              Text(
                themeMode.name,
              ),
            ],
          ),
        ),
        floatingActionButton: FloatingActionButton(
          onPressed: () => ref.read(themeStateProvider.notifier).setTheme(),
          tooltip: 'Change theme',
          child: const Icon(Icons.color_lens_outlined),
        ), // This trailing comma makes auto-formatting nicer for build methods.
      ),
    );
  }
}

This code is clean and suited for production projects.

In case of any questions feel free to ask them on GitHub. The full code is here https://github.com/awaik/flutter_swith_theme_riverpod

Flutter theme with Riverpod (2.0 generator)

Written by awaik