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:

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

// set
const setSome = async () => {
    try {
        const response = await db.collection('users').doc('foo').set({ email: 'user@example.com' })
        console.log(response.writeTime.toDate())
    } catch (err) {
        console.error(err)
    }
}

// where
const setSome = async () => {
    try {
        const response = await db.collection('users').where('email', '==', 'user@example.com').where('name', '>=', 'foo').get()
        response.forEach(user => {
            console.log(user.data())
        })
        console.log(response.writeTime.toDate())
    } catch (err) {
        console.error(err)
    }
}