Im developing a solution where I have data stored on firestore. On the other side I have react based website which reads this data.
Today I "authenticate" the solution in my test with in the backend a firebase config and that they enter a uniqID in the URL. So example: company.com/display/asdkjlasdjkl239023. I then do simple firestoreConnect where I add the ID as where clause. Right now my firestore rules are just open for all. But for production this dosen't seems so secure.
In theory I guess I would want some typ of authentication when the device first loads. Maybe a pin code would be good (email/password etc is to long). Then there would be a rule only allowing this connection to read what they are supposed to read nothing else.
Im trying to figure out how this could be solved but don't have any good idea. I figured somebody must have built something similar before :)
You can use Firebase Authentication phone Auth to verify a user based on their phone number, easier than email/password. You can even create your custom authentication inside Firebase Auth.
To secure your firestore or real time database, you need to use and understand Firebase Security Rules you can write security rules which will block the user from accessing other files that they aren't suppose to (which are ofc decided by you).
I'm new to react native. I am trying to develop an application that uses firebase user authentication. But there is something I can think of. For example, 2 users have registered to my application but I want to show extra information to the first user according to a condition.
How can I separate these two?
Where exactly should I manage this condition?
The question is not super clear as to what issue you are trying to tackle so I apologize if I am inferring incorrectly.
I use MongoDB personally with a Node/Express backend for user data and haven't used Firebase myself but I'm sure you can do the same things with it. I'll be speaking in Mongo terminology but again I'm sure you can do the same with Firebase and at the least this will give a good idea of the thought process.
I have a UserSchema that holds all the user information. When logged in the client app would get this information to be used on the frontend after authentication.
Assuming you are only displaying "extra" information that doesn't need additional privilege you can just pull in the users data stored in firebase and handle the display of this extra info with logic on your frontend client.
If its extra privilege you need to setup firebase to look at the user data that is authenticating and only serve back information if they have the proper privileges.
Also important to note, you should ensure that when you are updating user information from client -> firebase backend you should ensure that you can only update specific user fields via read/write authentication on firebase.
Hope this gives a little better idea on how this process might look. I'll let someone who has used firebase specifically add tech specifics.
I have been introduced to Firebase a few days ago. Since then I have been trying to discover more features and usage of Firebase, in particular, the usage of the Firestore/Realtime Database.
However, as I am reading into more details, I start to think of some questions. I hope someone that is familiar with Firebase can help me answer them
As for User authentication, I understand that I can use Firebase Authentication where I won't see their real password. However, technically, everything that user stores in my Firestore would be visible to me since I am the owner of the Firebase.
For example, if I were to develop a note/chat app, in which the user can access their notes/chat on the iOS app and also Android. That means all their notes data would be saved in my database. If it happens to contain some private data, then I would be able to read it?
Even if I set security rules, that would be only facing client-side, whereas, for me, the owner of the entire firebase data, I could see the whole thing. Surely, as a customer, you won't want to use an app knowing that I can see everything you write
I am not sure if what I said is true or not. If true, is there a possible solution?
Both of your statements are correct. This happens in most of the apps-websites, the admin or some core developers have full access to the data. That's why privacy policy and GDPR exist. You must specify what data you collect and for what reason. If you intend to use your user data for any other reason you must inform them. Be aware that if you disclose any user information without his permission you can be held liable.
Let's say I'm developing app like Instagram: for iOS, Android and Web. I decided to use Google Firebase as it really seems to simplify the work.
The features user needs in the app are:
Authorization/Registration
Uploading photos
Searching for other people, following them and see their photos
I come from traditional "own-backend" development where I do need to setup a server, create database and finally write the API to let the frontend retrieve the data from the server. That's the reason why it's unclear to me how it all works in Firebase.
So the question is how can I create such app:
Should I create my own API with cloud functions? Or it's ok to work with the database directly from the client-side?
If I work with the database directly why do I need cloud functions? Should I use them?
Sorry for such silly questions, but it is really hard to get from scratch.
The main difference between Firebase and the traditional setup you describe is that with Firebase, as far as the app developer is concerned, the client has direct access to the database, without the need for an intermediate custom API layer. Firebase provides SDKs in various languages that you would typically use to fetch the data you need / commit data updates.
You also have admin SDKs that you can use server-side, but these are meant for you to run some custom business logic - such as analytics, caching in an external service, for exemple - not for you to implement a data fetching API layer.
This has 2 important consequences:
You must define security rules to control who is allowed to read/write at what paths in your database. These security rules are defined at the project level, and rely on the authenticated user (using Firebase Authentication). Typically, if you store the user profile at the path users/$userId, you would define a rule saying that this node can be written to only if the authenticated user has an id of $userId.
You must structure your data in a way that makes it easily readable - without the need for complex database operations such as JOINs that are not supported by Firebase (you do have some limited querying options tough).
These 2 points allow you to skip the 2 main roles of traditional APIs: validating access and fetching/formatting the data.
Cloud functions allow you to react to data changes. Let's say everytime a new user is created, you want to send him a Welcome email: you could define a cloud function sending this email everytime a new node is appended to the users path. They allow you to run the code you would typically run server-side when writes happen, so they can have a very broad range of use-cases: side-effects (such as sending an email), caching data in an external service, caching data within Firebase for easier reads, analytics, etc..
You don't really need a server, you can access the database directly from the client, as long as your users are authenticated and you have defined reasonable security rules on Firebase.
In your use case you could, for example, use cloud functions to create a thumbnail when someone uploads a photo (Firebase Cloud Functions has ImageMagick included for that), or to denormalize your data so your application is faster, or to generate logs. So, basically you can use them whenever you need to do some server side processing when something changes on your database or storage. But I find cloud functions hard to develop and debug, and there are alternatives such as creating a Node application that subscribes to real time changes in your data and processes it. The downside is that you need to host it outside Firebase.
My answer is definitely NOT complete or professional, but here are the reasons why I choose Cloud Functions
Performance
You mentioned that you're writing an instagram-like mobile device app, then I assume that people can comment on others' pictures, as well as view those comments. How would you like to download comments from database and display them on users' devices? I mean, there could be hundreds, maybe thousands of comments on 1 post, you'll need to paginate your results. Why not let the server do all the hard work, free up users' devices and wait for the results? This doesn't seem like a lot better, but let's face it, if your app is incredibly successful, you'll have millions of users, millions of comments that you need to deal with, server will do those hard jobs way better than a mobile phone.
Security
If your project is small, then it's true that you won't worry about performance, but what about security? If you do everything on client side, you're basically allowing every device to connect to your database, meaning that every device can read from/write into your database. Once a malicious user have found out your database url, all he has to do is to
firebase.database().ref(...).remove();
With 1 line of code, you'll lose all your data. Okay, if you say, then I'll just come up with some good security rules like the one below:
This means that for each post, only the owner of that post can make any changes to it or read from it, other people are forbidden to do anything. It's good, but not realistic. People are supposed to be able to comment on the post, that's modifying the post, this rule will not apply to the situation. But again, if you let everybody read/write, it's not safe again. Then, why not just make .read and .write false, like this:
It's 100% safe, because nobody can do anything about anything in your database. Then, you write an API to do all the operations to your database. API limits the operations that can be done to your database. And you have experience in writing APIs, I'm sure you can do something to make your API strong in terms of security, for example, if a user wants to delete a post that he created, in your deletePost API, you're supposed to authenticate the user first. This way, 'nobody' can cause any damage to your database.
I am considering firebase for an app - mainly for the real-time but other features like the analytics and authentication (and price) are other bonuses.
I have my own database and I want everything saved in there. Firebase will have a small portion of the dataset I push as it's needed.
So I'm basically thinking that the firebase data will be read only to the users. If a user comments, that will actually go to my server, I'll authenticate, clean, whatever.. and push to the that feed.
Are there problems with this approach? Are there other (better) ways to solve the problem?
This is a completely valid approach. Firebase is designed so you can use specific features that suit your needs.