react-native-firebase/docs/firebase-setup.md

Firebase Setup

The RNFirebase library is intended on making it easy to work with Firebase and provides a small native shim to the Firebase native code.

To add Firebase to your project, make sure to create a project in the Firebase console

Each platform uses a different setup method after creating the project.

iOS

After creating a Firebase project, click on the Add Firebase to your iOS app and follow the steps from there to add the configuration file. You do not need to set up a cocoapods project (this is already done through RNFirebase). Make sure not to forget the Copy Files phase in iOS.

Download the Firebase config file and place it in your app directory next to your app source code:

Once you download the configuration file, make sure you place it in the root of your Xcode project. Every different Bundle ID (aka, even different project variants needs their own configuration file).

Lastly, due to some dependencies requirements, RNFirebase supports iOS versions 8.0 and up. Make sure to update the minimum version of your iOS app to 8.0.

Android

There are several ways to setup Firebase on Android. The easiest way is to pass the configuration settings in JavaScript. In that way, there is no setup for the native platform.

google-services.json setup

If you prefer to include the default settings in the source of your app, download the google-services.json file provided by Firebase in the Add Firebase to Android platform menu in your Firebase configuration console.

Next you'll have to add the google-services gradle plugin in order to parse it.

Add the google-services gradle plugin as a dependency in the project level build.gradle android/build.gradle

buildscript {
  // ...
  dependencies {
    // ...
    classpath 'com.google.gms:google-services:3.0.0'
  }
}

In your app build.gradle file, add the gradle plugin at the VERY BOTTOM of the file (below all dependencies) android/app/build.gradle

apply plugin: 'com.google.gms.google-services'

Usage

After creating a Firebase project and installing the library, we can use it in our project by importing the library in our JavaScript:

import RNFirebase from 'react-native-firebase'

We need to tell the Firebase library we want to configure the project. RNFirebase provides a way to configure both the native and the JavaScript side of the project at the same time with a single command:

const firebase = new RNFirebase();

We can pass custom options by passing an object with configuration options. The configuration object will be generated first by the native configuration object, if set and then will be overridden if passed in JS. That is, all of the following key/value pairs are optional if the native configuration is set.

option	type	Default Value	Description
debug	bool	false	When set to true, RNFirebase will log messages to the console and fire debug events we can listen to in js
persistence	bool	false	When set to true, database persistence will be enabled.
bundleID	string	Default from app [NSBundle mainBundle]	The bundle ID for the app to be bundled with
googleAppID	string	""	The Google App ID that is used to uniquely identify an instance of an app.
databaseURL	string	""	The database root (i.e. https://my-app.firebaseio.com)
deepLinkURLScheme	string	""	URL scheme to set up durable deep link service
storageBucket	string	""	The Google Cloud storage bucket name
androidClientID	string	""	The Android client ID used in Google AppInvite when an iOS app has it's android version
GCMSenderID	string	""	The Project number from the Google Developer's console used to configure Google Cloud Messaging
trackingID	string	""	The tracking ID for Google Analytics
clientID	string	""	The OAuth2 client ID for iOS application used to authenticate Google Users for signing in with Google
APIKey	string	""	The secret iOS API key used for authenticating requests from our app

For instance:

const configurationOptions = {
  debug: true
};
const firebase = new RNFirebase(configurationOptions);
firebase.on('debug', msg => console.log('Received debug message', msg))