Emulators and CI Deploys

From laptop to production

During development, point the SDKs at the Emulator Suite with connectFirestoreEmulator, connectAuthEmulator, connectStorageEmulator and connectFunctionsEmulator, and seed data with --import / --export-on-exit. In CI, run unit and rules tests inside firebase emulators:exec, then deploy with the Firebase CLI authenticated through a Google Cloud service account (for example via workload identity federation or GOOGLE_APPLICATION_CREDENTIALS) rather than a personal login; legacy CI tokens are deprecated, so check the docs. Deploy rules, indexes, functions and hosting from version control so production always matches the repository.

Local wiring and a CI script

TypeScript and Firebase CLI (shown, not run).

# src/firebase.ts (development only)
# if (location.hostname === "localhost") {
#   connectAuthEmulator(auth, "http://127.0.0.1:9099");
#   connectFirestoreEmulator(db, "127.0.0.1", 8080);
#   connectStorageEmulator(storage, "127.0.0.1", 9199);
# }

# local development with saved seed data
firebase emulators:start --import=./seed --export-on-exit

# CI: test against emulators, then deploy with a service account
npm ci
firebase emulators:exec --only firestore,auth,storage "npm test"
npm run build
firebase deploy --only firestore:rules,firestore:indexes,storage,functions,hosting \
  --project production --non-interactive

Rules deploy with code

Keep firestore.rules and storage.rules in the repository and deploy them in CI, never by editing in the console, so every change is reviewed and tested.

त्वरित जाँच: How should a CI pipeline authenticate the Firebase CLI?

• With the public web API key
• With a developer's personal password
• With a Google Cloud service account
• It needs no authentication