Create a Firebase Project

Open the Firebase console and follow the wizard. It's pretty straightforward. I bound my project to a Google Cloud Platform project I was already using and used the Blaze plan.

The wizard is intuitive, I won't cover its steps here.

Navigate into your project and "Add Firebase to your web app". Once that's done you can use the CLI to deploy the app.

Install Firebase CLI

Installing Firebase CLI requires the npm command from NodeJS. If you want to configure your dev environment in Ansible, check out my Installing Node.js with Ansible post.

# Add the key for the nodesource Apt repository
wget -qO https://deb.nodesource.com/gpgkey/nodesource.gpg.key | sudo apt-key add -

# Add the nodesource apt repo
echo "deb https://deb.nodesource.com/node_13.x bionic main" > /etc/apt/sources.d/nodesource
apt-get update

# Install NodeJS to get the npm command
apt-get install -y nodejs

# Install firebase-tools
npm install firebase-tools

Logging In

If your CLI and browser are on the same system, just run firebase login and ignore the rest of this section.

I haven't found a way to log into Firebase CLI that doesn't need a web browser. The limitation was inconvenient since I develop inside an Ubuntu server VM.

The options I figure would work are:

1. Using a local Vagrant VM, forward the port that the oauth site tries to redirect to on localhost. This was the easiest for my local dev environment, so it's what I did. You copy the URL from your CLI into your workstation's browser, then have it redirect http://localhost:9005/ to your VM. Here's an example of how to forward the port in a Vagrantfile: config.vm.network :forwarded_port, host: 9005, guest: 9005
2. Install Chrome in Ubuntu server then launch it with X11 Forwarding
3. Create a reverse SSH tunnel from a port on your laptop to the development server. Here's a post where I've done SSH port forwarding
4. Use the firebase login:ci command and the --token argument. This option was my fallback, but you still need to install firebase-cli on your actual workstation with a browser to use it.

Once successfully authenticated your browser will show a message saying Woohoo! Firebase CLI Login Successful.

Deploy Hello World

Make an index file in a directory for this app

mkdir app
cd app
mkdir public
echo "<h1>Hello World!</h1>" > public/index.html

firebase init

Initialize the directory as an application. This will present you with an intuitive wizard.

firebase init

# When prompted,
#  choose only Hosting
#  keep your index file
#  decide if you'll use a single page app

Single-page app setting

Running firebase init generates a firebase.json file for your project. In single-page mode, this file will rewrite all traffic to index.html. You can edit the file to change this behaviour. The rewrite block in "hosting": looks like this:

    "rewrites": [{
      "source": "**",
      "destination": "/index.html"
    }],

firebase deploy

Deploy the default app

firebase deploy

The deploy command will print a Hosting URL. The Hello World site can be loaded from there.