[FR] - Firebase Admin Lite

[jdgamble555]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.
Currently Firebase cannot run on Deno, Cloudflare, Vercel Edge, or Bun (among others). Firebase will mainly be used in Node Serverless environments with Cold Starts, which are unacceptable for many app developers.

Describe the solution you'd like
If you don't require Authentication, you can use the "Firestore Lite" package. However, we cannot use Authentication or the Server Functions in order to keep our session. This is a HUGE problem and limits where Firebase can be deployed.

Describe alternatives you've considered
Using the REST API. However, it is EXTREMELY cumbersome in order to convert JSON data to the data types that REST API uses, as well as the problems handling tokens etc.

Additional context

• [FR] Admin version of the Firestore Lite SDK #1879 - This should have been reopened, but never was.
• https://firebase.uservoice.com/forums/948424-general/suggestions/48355772-firebase-admin-lite - User Voice Feature Request

It would be nice to be able to use the FirebaseServerApp as well, but this would not have ALL the features we may need in other JS environments.

J

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[dconeybe]

@jdgamble555 Thank you for raising this issue. Could you elaborate on the use case where the preferRest option (as noted in #1879) does not solve your issue?

[jdgamble555]

Yes, this will not solve the problem as "Edge" computing cannot load packages like "fs", "stream", "child_process", "crypto", "os", etc... This are usually items that are required with grpc, protobuf protocol etc... but NOT with REST API.

J

[jdgamble555]

setting preferRest still loads these items

[dconeybe]

Ok I think I see what you're saying. Could you mention which Firebase products specifically would be useful to you in a "lite" SDK? You mentioned Firestore for one. Also, would you prefer a "tree-shakeable" API (like https://github.com/firebase/firebase-js-sdk) or an object-oriented API (like https://github.com/firebase/firebase-admin-node)?

In any case, this is a pretty big undertaking so I have no promises as to if, or when, such a product will become available. But it's helpful to gather yours (and others') requirements for a time when we decide to scope such a project.

[dconeybe]

Also, could you describe how you would envision authentication to work? Authentication in the firebase-node-admin SDK in non-google edge computing environments would likely need an "exported service account key file" (https://firebase.google.com/docs/admin/setup) and these environments often do not have access to the file system. Would it work, for example, to be able to specify the JSON contents of the key file rather than a path to the key file? Then, at runtime, the code would need to first obtain the key file from some other place (e.g. d1/kv/r2 in cloudflare workers) and specify it to the initialization function for Firebase.

[jdgamble555]

Here is how I setup my Firebase Admin app now. I use the environment variables.

Firestore already has a "lite" version that works with the REST API. It will work on non-node runtimes. However, it is only Firestore (not Firebase Auth etc) so you can't use an authentication token nor fetch data behind Firestore Rules.

Here is an example of a package that tries to mimic what Firebase Admin should already do.

https://github.com/Moe03/firebase-admin-rest

I have seen enough of these packages built over the years, that they never keep up-to-date. This is how it should work out-of-the-box IMO.

Imagine:

import { getAuth } from 'firebase-admin/auth/lite';
import { getFirestore } from 'firebase-admin/firestore/lite';

Similar to how the frontend works.

J