Hosting Vector Tiles From Firebase Cloud Storage - firebase

Question

I am hosting vector tiles that are being consumed by my javascript web application with mapboxGL.
MapboxGL requests these tile from the bucket in a very specific way. When instantiating the map you provide a url to your bucket like this:
addLayer({
source: {
type: "vector",
tiles: [
`https://storage.googleapis.com/${bucketName}/{z}/{x}/{y}.pbf`,
],
minZoom: 4,
maxZoom: 12,
}
})
And the map will request the proper tiles based on the viewport. You can transform the request and add Authorization: Bearer {{tokens}} to each request for a tile by adding the following property:
transformRequest: (url, resourceType) => {
if (url.startsWith(settings.VECTOR_TILE_BUCKET_URL)) {
return {
url: url,
headers: {
Authorization: `Bearer ${accessToken}`,
'Cache-Control': 'no-cache'
}
};
}
}
Now here is my question for someone familiar with firebase. When setting 'rules' on my cloud storage bucket, can I allow read access for all users in the account and then pass the firebase token that the user receives as a Bearer {{token}} in these tile requests? Is there another method I could protect my vector tiles with firebase's services that I'm not thinking of? I read the documentation where it shows how to access cloud storage bucket using the firebase SDK but it's unclear if I can also auth into their bucket by passing the token in a more traditional format as a query param.

Answer 1

In the Official Cloud Storage Authentication Documentation, you can see many methods of authentication (with gsutil, Client Library, Api), but as you are using Firebase, Firebase SDK comes with Firebase Authentication built-in, so Firebase SDK is the only way to access the bucket, such as the SDK handles all auth related operations and using other methods could expose your apps to risks.
An another way to authenticate could be using Real-time Database Rest API, which I think will not help you for your scenario.