Firestore REST

Due to an issue with gRPC, any request that involves Firestore in conjunction with Firebase Functions with take 5-10 seconds to respond after a deploy.

For more information about this particular issue, see this ticket.

As of February 2019, if you want your Firestore requests to respond in less than 5-10 seconds after a deploy, you have to use the REST API provided by googleapis.

This package wraps the googleapis class for Firestore in a way that is easier to use.

Hopefully, when this ticket is resolved, this package will no longer be necessary, but according to Google support, this might be a persistent issue until late 2019. Until then, you should be able to use this package without much downside.

https://cloud.google.com/firestore/docs/reference/rest/v1/projects.databases.documents

Set up

npm i --save firestore-rest

You will need to ensure that you have GOOGLE_APPLICATION_CREDENTIALS and GCLOUD_PROJECT as environment variables. The former is the path to your .json credentials file, and the latter is the project name.

NOTE: I found that I had to export these within the function because Firebase Functions does not allow upper-case variable names for some reason. If you try to do so, you'll get the following error:

Error: Invalid config name onCadenceAssignToContact.GOOGLE_APPLICATION_CREDENTIALS, cannot use upper case.

So my firebase initialization file has this at the top:

process.env.GOOGLE_APPLICATION_CREDENTIALS = path.join(__dirname, '../path/to/credentials.json')
process.env.GCLOUD_PROJECT = 'my-app-name'

These aren't secret, so it doesn't really matter how you pass those values to the API.

Usage

When initializing firebase-admin, initialize and export db as well. See example below for one way to configure your app:

const admin = require('firebase-admin')
const Firestore = require('firestore-rest')
const path = require('path')
 
process.env.GOOGLE_APPLICATION_CREDENTIALS = path.join(__dirname, '../path/to/credentials.json')
process.env.GCLOUD_PROJECT = 'my-app-name'
 
var serviceAccount = require('../path/to/credentials.json')
 
admin.initializeApp({
  credential: admin.credential.cert(serviceAccount),
  databaseURL: 'https://<your app>.firebaseio.com'
})
 
// const db = admin.firestore() <= this is the old way to do it
const db = new Firestore()
 
module.exports = {
  admin,
  db
}

Then you can use the function the same way you would otherwise, as this package transforms the results to be backwards-compatible. For example:

const getSome = async () => {
  try {
    const response = await db.collection('users').doc('12312312421321').get()
    console.info(response)
  } catch (err) {
    console.error(err)
  }
}

TODO

This currently only supports .collection and .doc calls with a .get method. At some point, this will need to include other methods such as .where to be more robust.

• Support .set
• Support .where