Firebase CLI

Node Package

You can install the Firebase CLI using npm (the Node Package Manager). Note that you will need to install Node.js and npm. Installing Node.js should install npm as well.

To download and install the Firebase CLI run the following command:

npm install -g firebase-tools

This will provide you with the globally accessible firebase command.

Standalone Binary

The standalone binary distribution of the Firebase CLI allows you to download a firebase executable without any dependencies.

To download and install the CLI run the following command:

curl -sL firebase.tools | bash

The command firebase --help lists the available commands and firebase <command> --help shows more details for an individual command.

If a command is project-specific, you must either be inside a project directory with an active project alias or specify the Firebase project id with the -P <project_id> flag.

Below is a brief list of the available commands and their function:

Configuration Commands

Append --no-localhost to login (i.e., firebase login --no-localhost) to copy and paste code instead of starting a local server for authentication. A use case might be if you SSH into an instance somewhere and you need to authenticate to Firebase on that machine.

Project Management Commands

Deployment and Local Emulation

These commands let you deploy and interact with your Firebase services.

App Distribution Commands

Auth Commands

Detailed doc is here.

Realtime Database Commands

Extensions Commands

Cloud Firestore Commands

Cloud Functions Commands

Hosting Commands

General

The Firebase CLI can use one of three authentication methods listed in descending priority:

• GOOGLE_APPLICATION_CREDENTIALS - if this environment variable points to a service account key file, the Firebase CLI will authenticate as a service account.
• firebase login - you can log in to the CLI directly as yourself. The CLI will store an authorized user credential.
  • FIREBASE_TOKEN - you can explicitly use this environment variable to pass in a long-lived user token from firebase login:ci.
• gcloud auth application-default login - if your development machine has application default credentials from the Google Cloud CLI, we will use them if none of the above credentials are present.

Cloud Functions Emulator

The Cloud Functions emulator is exposed through commands like emulators:start, serve and functions:shell. Emulated Cloud Functions run as independent node processes on your development machine which means they have their own credential discovery mechanism.

By default these node processes are not able to discover credentials from firebase login. In order to provide a better development experience, when you are logged in to the CLI through firebase login we take the user credentials and construct a temporary credential that we pass into the emulator through GOOGLE_APPLICATION_CREDENTIALS. We only do this if you have not already set the GOOGLE_APPLICATION_CREDENTIALS environment variable yourself.

The Firebase CLI requires a browser to complete authentication, but is fully compatible with CI and other headless environments.

1. On a machine with a browser, install the Firebase CLI.
2. Run firebase login:ci to log in and print out a new refresh token (the current CLI session will not be affected).
3. Store the output token in a secure but accessible way in your CI system.

There are two ways to use this token when running Firebase commands:

1. Store the token as the environment variable FIREBASE_TOKEN and it will automatically be utilized.
2. Run all commands with the --token <token> flag in your CI system.

The order of precedence for token loading is flag, environment variable, active project.

On any machine with the Firebase CLI, running firebase logout --token <token> will immediately revoke access for the specified token.

The Firebase CLI can also be used programmatically as a standard Node module. Each command is exposed as a function that takes an options object and returns a Promise. For example:

var client = require("firebase-tools");
client.projects
  .list()
  .then(function(data) {
    console.log(data);
  })
  .catch(function(err) {
    // handle error
  });

client
  .deploy({
    project: "myfirebase",
    token: process.env.FIREBASE_TOKEN,
    force: true,
    cwd: "/path/to/project/folder",
  })
  .then(function() {
    console.log("Rules have been deployed!");
  })
  .catch(function(err) {
    // handle error
  });

Some commands, such as firebase use require both positional arguments and options flags. In this case you first provide any positional arguments as strings followed by an object containing the options:

var client = require("firebase-tools");
client
  .use("projectId", {
    // Equivalent to --add when using the CLI
    add: true,
  })
  .then(function(data) {
    console.log(data);
  })
  .catch(function(err) {
    // handle error
  });

Note: when used in a limited environment like Cloud Functions, not all firebase-tools commands will work programatically because they require access to a local filesystem.