Firebase emulators fail to start with meaningless error - firebase

Question

We've been using the emulators for a while now. Suddenly, they stopped working on the machines of two developers (but not all developers). They attempt to invoke firebase emulators:start and are then treated to the following error message: Error: An unexpected error has occurred.
We really have no idea why this is happening. We even tried redoing firebase init and emulators init. So far nothing we have tried has helped. Here is the console output for more detail:
➜ firebase git:(dev-vab) ✗ firebase emulators:start
i emulators: Starting emulators: functions, firestore, database, hosting, pubsub
⚠ functions: The following emulators are not running, calls to these services from the Functions emulator will affect production: auth
⚠ Your requested "node" version "10" doesn't match your global version "14"
i firestore: Firestore Emulator logging to firestore-debug.log
i database: Database Emulator logging to database-debug.log
i hosting: Serving hosting files from: public
✔ hosting: Local server: http://0.0.0.0:5000
i pubsub: Pub/Sub Emulator logging to pubsub-debug.log
i ui: Emulator UI logging to ui-debug.log
i functions: Watching "/Users/isaacmartin/git_repos/firebase/functions" for Cloud Functions...
✔ functions[updateUser]: firestore function initialized.
✔ functions[handleEventInviteeCreation]: http function initialized (http://0.0.0.0:5001/likemindedly-stage/us-central1/handleEventInviteeCreation).
i emulators: Shutting down emulators.
i ui: Stopping Emulator UI
⚠ Emulator UI has exited upon receiving signal: SIGINT
i functions: Stopping Functions Emulator
i hosting: Stopping Hosting Emulator
i database: Stopping Database Emulator
i firestore: Stopping Firestore Emulator
i pubsub: Stopping Pub/Sub Emulator
i hub: Stopping emulator hub
i logging: Stopping Logging Emulator
Error: An unexpected error has occurred.
Having trouble? Try again or contact support with contents of firebase-debug.log
Now, you will note that we did check the debug log and found the following, which may be related:
[debug] [2020-10-22T22:06:39.394Z] 15:06:39.394 [FirebaseWorkerPool-1-2] WARN com.firebase.core.namespace.NamespaceActorSystem - Request for ns: likemindedly-stage has incorrect domain. Current domain: 0.0.0.0, expected domain: firebaseio-staging.com
{"metadata":{"emulator":{"name":"database"},"message":"15:06:39.394 [FirebaseWorkerPool-1-2] WARN com.firebase.core.namespace.NamespaceActorSystem - Request for ns: likemindedly-stage has incorrect domain. Current domain: 0.0.0.0, expected domain: firebaseio-staging.com\n"}}
[debug] [2020-10-22T22:06:39.448Z] <<< HTTP RESPONSE 404 {"content-length":"231","content-type":"application/json; charset=utf-8","access-control-allow-origin":"*","cache-control":"no-cache"}
[debug] [2020-10-22T22:06:39.448Z] <<< HTTP RESPONSE BODY {
"correctUrl" : "https://likemindedly-stage.firebaseio-staging.com",
"error" : "Namespace likemindedly-stage lives in a different region. Please change your database URL to https://likemindedly-stage.firebaseio-staging.com"
}
It seems to be complaining that we are pointing at local emulators in our config, though, it's not clear why this would be a problem?

Answer 1

I also encountered this issue starting just a few hours ago. It allowed me to start the emulators as normal when I removed the hosts from my firebase.json, but I haven't figured out what exactly is causing the error or how to set the hosts properly outside of the json file.

Answer 2

Another way to solve this problem is to add the new firebase auth emulator to your emulator suite.