VaporFirebaseDemo

A sample project showing how to connect server-side Swift Vapor to Firebase's Cloud Firestore database. This repository is the demo project for the Medium article that I wrote on this subject.

What Does It Do?

This Vapor server publishes a random number to a Firebase Cloud Firestore database every 60 seconds. The idea is to pair this with something like the iOS Client Demo App to show how server-side Swift code can send realtime updates to client devices via Firebase.

Getting started

If you'd like to run this server yourself, here's what you need to do:

Create a Firebase App

Create a new app in Firebase. I called mine "VaporFirebaseDemo".

Install Vapor

Check out the official installation instructions at vapor.codes or use Homebrew:

brew tap vapor/homebrew-tap
brew update
brew install vapor

Clone the repository

git clone https://github.com/tylermilner/VaporFirebaseDemo.git

Generate the Xcode project

Run the following command to generate an Xcode project from the Package.swift file:

vapor xcode

Running the Server

By default, this server will crash on launch until you've setup your environment variables. Specifically, you need to set the value of the GOOGLE_SERVICE_ACCOUNT_PRIVATE_KEY environment variable to the RSA private key for your Google Service Account.

Obtaining the RSA Private Key

Refer to the Medium article for help on how to download and massage your Google Service Account's private key into a format suitable for Vapor's JWTProvider.

Setting the Environment Variable

These instructions are also in the article, but the gist of it goes something like:

• Select the "Run" scheme and then choose "Edit Scheme".
• Create an environment variable called GOOGLE_SERVICE_ACCOUNT_PRIVATE_KEY.
• Set the value of GOOGLE_SERVICE_ACCOUNT_PRIVATE_KEY to the RSA private key that you generated.

As an alternative to using the environment variable, you can also move the Config/jwt.json file into the "secrets" folder (final path would be Config/secrets/jwt.json) and then replace $GOOGLE_SERVICE_ACCOUNT_PRIVATE_KEY with your RSA private key directly in the configuration file. This assumes that your .gitignore is already setup to ignore the Config/secrets directory. If it's not, don't do this!

Configuring the Server

The only other configuration options you need to modify are in Config/app.json:

• googleServiceAccountEmail - replace the value for this key with the email address for your Google Service Account.
• firebaseProjectId - replace the value for this key with the project identifier for your Firebase app.

Build and Run

After you've configured the server with your Google Service Account private key, email, and Firebase project ID, you should be able to run the server. Select the Run scheme and hit CMD + R to build and run the server.

The server in its current form will start publishing random numbers to Firebase as soon as it's started. If you want to manually publish an update to Firebase through the server, you can hit the /nextRandom endpoint at anytime by issuing a HTTP POST request to http://0.0.0.0:8080/nextRandom. The server will then publish a new random number to Firebase and then return the Firebase response to you. This will give you a peek into how Firebase Cloud Firestore structures the document insertion/update.