setup_firebase_multiple_envs.mo.md

[MO] Setup Firebase on iOS/Android with multiple environments (~1h)

Owner: Louis Lagrange

Correcter: Thomas Pucci

Prerequisites (~30min)

• An Android or iOS app with the Firebase SDK installed

  • For React Native apps, you can use react-native-firebase:
    • iOS
    • Android

• Be careful, when you're using specific modules of firebase, like analytics, you may have to add some compile to the gradle and some external pods

Foreword

You can install and setup Firebase with two different ways:

	Javascript asynchronous setup	Native synchronous setup
Pros	- 👍 No Native code is required - ⏩ Setup is quick	- 🚀 In your application, you do not need to wait for firebase to instantiate each time you need it - ✅ You can use Firebase Phone Authentication
Cons	⚠️ You cannot use this setup if you aim to use Firebase Phone Authentication as it requires the default Firebase app to be setup (meaning the native synchronous setup to be done: see the paragraph ℹ️ Important note here)	📲 You need install native libraries

This MO aims to setup Firebase with the Native synchronous setup. For the Javascript asynchronous setup read the docs here; and each time you need to call Firebase in your JS code, wait for the Firebase app initialization with onReady() method.

Steps (~30min)

It's pretty straightforward to install Firebase when you have only one environment. But what if you have multiple environments, such as dev, staging and production? Here's a step-by-step guide.

Android (~10min)

On Android, Firebase groups the different configurations in one file.

1. Go to the Firebase console
2. Select your project
3. Click "Add an application", choose Android
4. Fill in the form (giving a name like Staging), click save, and close the window
5. Repeat steps 3 to 4 for all your environments
6. Download the google-services.json file
   1. Select one of the Android applications
   2. Click on "google-services.json"
7. Put google-services.json in your app folder (android/app in React-Native)
8. You might want to add google-services.json in your .gitignore

iOS (~20min)

On iOS, there is one Firebase configuration file per environment.

1. Go to the Firebase console
2. Select your project
3. Click "Add an application", choose iOS
4. Fill in the form (giving a name like Staging), click save
5. Download the configuration file GoogleService-Info.plist and rename it like GoogleService-Info.{APP_IDENTIFIER}.plist
   • Example: for tech.bam.myApp.staging, GoogleService-Info.tech.bam.myApp.staging.plist
6. Repeat steps 3 to 5 for all your environments
7. Duplicate your configuration file for dev environment two times and rename them like so:
   • GoogleService-Info.plist
   • GoogleService-Info..plist
8. Put all your configuration files in the root of your iOS app folder (ios in React-Native)
9. Make sure that your app identifier is injected in your .pbxproj. For example, if you're using Fastlane, add a update_app_identifier step like:

update_app_identifier(
  xcodeproj: xcodeproj_full_path,
  plist_path: plist_full_path,
  app_identifier: ENV['APP_IDENTIFIER']
)

If you bootstrapped your project with BAM generator, use the following in the iOS build lane:

update_app_identifier(
  xcodeproj: xcodeproj,
  plist_path: ENV['IOS_PLIST_PATH'],
  app_identifier: ENV['IOS_APP_ID']
)

10. In XCode, in Build phases, add a Select GoogleService-Info.plist build step before the Copy Bundle Resources step that contains:

cp "GoogleService-Info.plist" "GoogleService-Info.plist.bak"
cp "GoogleService-Info."$IOS_APP_ID".plist" "GoogleService-Info.plist"

11. In XCode, in Build phases, add a Clean GoogleService-Info.plist build step after the Copy Bundle Resources step that contains:

cp "GoogleService-Info.plist.bak" "GoogleService-Info.plist"
rm "GoogleService-Info.plist.bak"

12. Make sure that the GoogleService-Info.plist is listed in the resources of the Copy Bundle Resources step
13. You might want to add GoogleService-Info.*.plist in your .gitignore

Troubleshooting

You can take a look at the commit that adds crash reporting and analytics in DailyScrum: 8005ce3