A month of Flutter: setting up Firebase Firestore

Originally published on bendyworks.com.

After a user signs in with Google and registers, their info needs to be saved to a databasee. I'm going to use Firebase Firestore as my backend. Within the birb codebase I'm going to create a serverdirectory and initialize a Firestore project inside it using firebase-tools.

$ firebase init

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You're about to initialize a Firebase project in this directory:

  /home/abraham/Development/birb

? Which Firebase CLI features do you want to setup for this folder? Press Space to select features, then Enter to confirm your choices.
 ◯ Database: Deploy Firebase Realtime Database Rules
❯◉ Firestore: Deploy rules and create indexes for Firestore
 ◯ Functions: Configure and deploy Cloud Functions
 ◯ Hosting: Configure and deploy Firebase Hosting sites
 ◯ Storage: Deploy Cloud Storage security rules

I choose the same Firebase project being used for authentication, the default Firestore Rules file, and the default Firestore indexes file. By default .firebaserc is not .gitignored. I have added my .firebasrc to .gitignore because this is an open source project. Anyone who forks Birb will need to set up their own Firebase project.

In the Firebase console I will now enable Firestore for the project.

Here are the default firestore.rules that just say don't allow reads or writes.

service cloud.firestore {
  match /databases/{database}/documents {
    match /{document=**} {
      allow read, write: if false;
    }
  }
}

Deploying the rules is handled with the firebase-tools Node package.

$ npx firebase deploy

=== Deploying to 'birb-app-dev'...

i  deploying firestore
i  firestore: checking firestore.rules for compilation errors...
i  firestore: reading indexes from firestore.indexes.json...
✔  firestore: rules file firestore.rules compiled successfully
i  firestore: uploading rules firestore.rules...
✔  firestore: deployed indexes in firestore.indexes.json successfully
✔  firestore: released rules firestore.rules to cloud.firestore

✔  Deploy complete!

Project Console: https://console.firebase.google.com/project/birb-app-dev/overview

Installing the cloud_firestore package in pubspec.yaml happens last.

Before integrating with the Flutter code, I'm going to write some rules with so come back soon for that article.

Code changes

• #57 Add Firestore