Firebase Basics

firebase-basics

Bootstrap and product-reference layer for Firebase work. This skill is the entry point: it covers logging into the Firebase CLI, picking an active project, wiring the Firebase MCP server, and points to authoritative product docs under references/.

This skill is intentionally generic and non-opinionated. For environment-specific discipline (deploy gates, rules tests, index hygiene, secret rotation), load firebase-stack. For emulator-backed E2E harness work, load firebase-emulator-e2e-harness.

Triggers

Load this skill when:

• Starting work on a repo with firebase.json / .firebaserc and no Firebase context yet
• User asks a Firebase product question (what is X, how is it priced, what regions, what SDK)
• Setting up or repairing the Firebase MCP server
• A teammate-handoff repo has no scripts/ wrapper and you need the bare-CLI baseline

If the repo already has project-specific scripts and firebase-stack triggers fire, prefer firebase-stack.

Bootstrap

1. Verify the CLI is reachable

npx -y firebase-tools@latest --version

Always invoke as npx -y firebase-tools@latest <cmd> rather than bare firebase — this pins to the latest published CLI and avoids "works on my machine" version drift. (Yes, even in Bun-default repos; firebase-tools is npm-distributed.)

2. Log in (interactive)

npx -y firebase-tools@latest login

The login flow opens a browser. If you're an agent in a non-interactive shell, stop and ask the user to run this themselves — do not attempt to script around the browser flow.

3. Pick an active project

npx -y firebase-tools@latest use

• If output is Active Project: <PROJECT_ID>, proceed.

• If no active project, ask the user for an existing project ID and run:

  npx -y firebase-tools@latest use --add <PROJECT_ID>
  

• If the user has no project yet, create one (only with explicit user approval — project creation is billable scope):

  npx -y firebase-tools@latest projects:create <PROJECT_ID> --display-name <DISPLAY_NAME>
  

4. Wire the Firebase MCP server (optional)

The Firebase CLI ships a local MCP server. To make it available to this agent, see references/mcp-usage.md. Detect first — many setups already have a firebase entry in their MCP config and re-adding it would overwrite siblings.

Reference docs

Authoritative Firebase product references, mirrored from google/skills firebase-basics. Read on demand:

• Firebase core concepts — product list, regional availability, Spark vs Blaze
• Firebase CLI usage — npx firebase-tools invocation pattern, self-documenting help
• Firebase client library usage — web/iOS/Android/Flutter SDKs and Admin SDK pointers
• Firebase CLI and MCP server — MCP config detection and merge protocol
• Firebase IaC usage — Terraform resources for Firebase
• Firebase security-related features — IAM roles, Security Rules basics, App Check

Extension: Google's full skill bundle

google/skills firebase-basics also instructs the agent to install Google's broader Firebase skill set:

npx -y skills add firebase/agent-skills -y

That bundle adds skills for firebase-firestore, firebase-hosting-basics, firebase-auth-basics, firebase-app-hosting-basics, firebase-data-connect-basics, firebase-ai-logic-basics, firebase-security-rules-auditor, and Genkit (developing-genkit-{js,go,dart}).

This is opt-in here, not mandatory. Reasons to skip it: those skills are generic and don't know about this user's environment conventions (emulator-first testing in firebase-emulator-e2e-harness, project-script discipline in firebase-stack, beads single-writer policy, Bun defaults). Reasons to run it: you're starting a brand-new Firebase project that needs Firestore data-modeling or Genkit guidance and the existing skills don't cover it. Ask the user before installing.

See also

• firebase-stack — environment-specific discipline: deploy targets, rules-test gates, index/query consistency, secret rotation, infra provisioning scripts
• firebase-emulator-e2e-harness — deterministic emulator harnesses for Playwright/Vitest E2E

Attribution

references/*.md are mirrored from google/skills (Apache 2.0 / per repo LICENSE) and may diverge from upstream over time. Re-fetch from https://raw.githubusercontent.com/google/skills/main/skills/cloud/firebase-basics/references/<file> to refresh.