B.1. Hosted packages and versioning with Pub

Each dependency hosted on the Pub website follows the same structure: title: version. There are special characters, like the ^, which describe a range of versions. The robust way to describe a version is by using comparison operators, such as

sdk: '>=2.0.0 <3.0.0'

This basically says, “Give me the newest version from 2.0.0 to 3.0.0, but not including 3.0.0.”

For Pub hosted packages, you can also use the caret (^) syntax to define a range. For example, path: ^1.4.1 is the same as saying, “Give me the newest version that is guaranteed to be backwards compatible to 1.4.1.”

Warning

If you’re using the > character in your pubspec, the line containing the > must be in quotes. Without quotes, it will be read as YAML syntax and break everything.