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.

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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.

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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.