Question

In apps that employ Material Design, there are two primary options for navigation: tabs and drawers. When there is insufficient space to support tabs, Drawers provide a handy alternative.

In Flutter, we can use the Drawer Widget in combination with a Scaffold to create a layout with a Material Design Drawer.

Directions

1. Create a Scaffold
2. Add a drawer
3. Populate the drawer with items
4. Close the drawer programmatically

1. Create a Scaffold

In order to add a Drawer to our app, we’ll need to wrap it in a Scaffold Widget. The Scaffold Widget provides a consistent visual structure to apps that follow the Material Design Guidelines. It also supports special Material Design components, such as Drawers, AppBars, and SnackBars.

In this case, we’ll want to create a Scaffold with a drawer:

Scaffold(
  drawer: // We'll add our Drawer here in the next step!
);

2. Add a drawer

We can now add a drawer to our Scaffold. A drawer could be any Widget, but it’s often best to use the Drawer widget from the material library, which adheres to the Material Design spec.

Scaffold(
  drawer: Drawer(
    child: // We'll populate the Drawer in the next step!
  )
);

3. Populate the drawer with items

Now that we have a Drawer in place, we can add content to it. In this example, we will use a ListView. While we could use a Column Widget, ListView is handy in this situation because it will allow users to scroll through the drawer if the content takes up more space than the screen supports.

We will populate the ListView with a DrawerHeader and two ListTile Widgets. For more information on working with Lists, please see the list recipes.

Drawer(
  // Add a ListView to the drawer. This ensures the user can scroll
  // through the options in the Drawer if there isn't enough vertical
  // space to fit everything.
  child: ListView(
    // Important: Remove any padding from the ListView.
    padding: EdgeInsets.zero,
    children: <Widget>[
      DrawerHeader(
        child: Text('Drawer Header'),
        decoration: BoxDecoration(
          color: Colors.blue,
        ),
      ),
      ListTile(
        title: Text('Item 1'),
        onTap: () {
          // Update the state of the app
          // ...
        },
      ),
      ListTile(
        title: Text('Item 2'),
        onTap: () {
          // Update the state of the app
          // ...
        },
      ),
    ],
  ),
);

4. Close the drawer programmatically

After a user taps on an item, we often want to close the drawer. How can we achieve this? Using the Navigator!

When a user opens the Drawer, Flutter adds the drawer to the navigation stack under the hood. Therefore, to close the drawer, we can call Navigator.pop(context).

ListTile(
  title: Text('Item 1'),
  onTap: () {
    // Update the state of the app
    // ...
    // Then close the drawer
    Navigator.pop(context);
  },
),

Complete example

import 'package:flutter/material.dart';

void main() => runApp(MyApp());

class MyApp extends StatelessWidget {
  final appTitle = 'Drawer Demo';

  @override
  Widget build(BuildContext context) {
    return MaterialApp(
      title: appTitle,
      home: MyHomePage(title: appTitle),
    );
  }
}

class MyHomePage extends StatelessWidget {
  final String title;

  MyHomePage({Key key, this.title}) : super(key: key);

  @override
  Widget build(BuildContext context) {
    return Scaffold(
      appBar: AppBar(title: Text(title)),
      body: Center(child: Text('My Page!')),
      drawer: Drawer(
        // Add a ListView to the drawer. This ensures the user can scroll
        // through the options in the Drawer if there isn't enough vertical
        // space to fit everything.
        child: ListView(
          // Important: Remove any padding from the ListView.
          padding: EdgeInsets.zero,
          children: <Widget>[
            DrawerHeader(
              child: Text('Drawer Header'),
              decoration: BoxDecoration(
                color: Colors.blue,
              ),
            ),
            ListTile(
              title: Text('Item 1'),
              onTap: () {
                // Update the state of the app
                // ...
                // Then close the drawer
                Navigator.pop(context);
              },
            ),
            ListTile(
              title: Text('Item 2'),
              onTap: () {
                // Update the state of the app
                // ...
                // Then close the drawer
                Navigator.pop(context);
              },
            ),
          ],
        ),
      ),
    );
  }
}