Firebase is pretty magic and for the most part delivers on the idea of an instant-on backend for your mobile or web-app. The problem with magic though is its hard to plan for if or when something does break. Take database backups for example. While traditional database backups are a known science, backing up Firebase’s storage (FireStore) setup is still a poorly documented / infrequently attempted effort.
I tried implementing that today and the official documentation only stressed me out. Thankfully, I found this article which got me most of the way there, though of course a few things had changed (api endpoints are now versioned v1 and the GoogleAuth library has a minor change on how it is initialized). Anyway, I am glad its finally done, but I wanted to share it here in case anyone else is looking for it.
While in Firebase, I also got a chance to play around with Firebase’s testing setup (my one cloud function in my project didn’t have a test so I implemented one). The local testing setup seems interesting but unfortunately I couldn’t get too far since FirebaseAuth isn’t supported yet, so for now my tests actually connect to a real Firebase account and run the test. Hopefully FirebaseAuth Triggers will be supported soon.
Finally I did try using Firebase Extensions for the first time and tied my Firebase Auth system to MailChimp. That worked flawlessly. I am really excited about the future of Firebase Extensions. Hopefully we’ll start seeing more functionality available as just a one-click addition to your project.
Code Zen 