Populate FIREBASE_CONFIG environment variable for scripts executed via emulators:exec

[ReonaN]

Related issues

no

[REQUIRED] Version info

node: 16.18.0

firebase-functions: 4.2.0

firebase-tools: 11.15.0

firebase-admin: 11.2.0

[REQUIRED] Test case

import * as admin from "firebase-admin";
import 'firebase-functions';

admin.initializeApp()
console.log('config', process.env.FIREBASE_CONFIG)

[REQUIRED] Steps to reproduce

I upgraded firebase-functions from v3.24.1 to v4.2.0.
After upgrading this package, I had an error in testing, and I noticed FIREBASE_CONFIG is missing.
There are console logs after running the above test case.

BEFORE (v3.24.1)
config {"databaseURL":"<my database url>","storageBucket":"<my backet>","projected":"<myproject id>"}

AFTER (v4.2.0)
config undefined

Also, I successfully got the GCLOUD_PROJECT environment variable.

[REQUIRED] Expected behavior

We can get the FIREBASE_CONFIG environment variable after initializing an app.

[REQUIRED] Actual behavior

FIREBASE_CONFIG environment variable is missing.
We got undefined when we referred to process.env.FIREBASE_CONFIG.

Were you able to successfully deploy your functions?

yes

[google-oss-bot]

I couldn't figure out how to label this issue, so I've labeled it for a human to triage. Hang tight.

[unxavi]

Hey, I just updated our dependencies from v3 to v4 and we are seeing the same. Is there any way we can help?

@ReonaN could you solved it?

[ReonaN]

@unxavi Not yet.
I tried again after updating the latest version of some related packages (firebase-admin, firebase-tools), but nothing changed.

[taeold]

@ReonaN @unxavi Thanks for surfacing the issue.

Can I ask under what setting you are running your code? I can think of 2 situations where FIREBASE_CONFIG will be populated:

1. Deployed to Google Cloud Functions
2. Executing under Firebase Emulator Suite

In other situations, I can see that FIREBASE_CONFIG to be missing. I'll go take a look, but if you can share more information about your use cases in the meantime, I'd appreciate it.

[unxavi]

hi @taeold for me this happening when running my tests on the Firebase emulator suite. however with the version 3 of firebase functions it's there, but when updating to version 4, I have a piece of code complaining that's undefined.

export function isProEnvironment(): boolean {
  if (process.env.FIREBASE_CONFIG != undefined) {
    const projectId = JSON.parse(process.env.FIREBASE_CONFIG).projectId;
    if (projectId != undefined) {
      // We should get this from the project/environment deploy variables
      return projectId === proProjectId;
    } else {
      throw new Error("projectId is undefined");
    }
  } else {
      throw new Error("process.env.FIREBASE_CONFIG is undefined");
  }
}

we are hitting the line

 throw new Error("process.env.FIREBASE_CONFIG is undefined");

i'm running the tests with the following command:

npm run build && firebase emulators:exec --project myProjectID 'npm test'

[taeold]

@unxavi Thanks for sharing more detail.

I inspected the code we removed in v3 → v4 unintentionally populated FIREBASE_CONFIG values.

Now I recognized that this behavior has existed for a long time, and I don't think breaking your setup is okay.

I'm going to propose that Firebase CLI always injects FIREBASE_CONFIG to scripts executed via emulators:exec.

In the meantime, if projectId is the only information you extract from FIREBASE_CONFIG, you'd can retrieve that info from process.env.GCLOUD_PROJECT instead.

Stay tuned on a longer term fix for this issue!