Web Quickstart - Firebase

Create an account

The first thing you need to do to get started with Firebase is sign up for a free account. A brand new Firebase app will automatically be created for you with its own unique database URL ending in firebaseio.com. We'll use this database URL to store and sync data.

Install Firebase

To include the Firebase client library in your website, add a script tag to the <head> section of your HTML file. We recommend including the library directly from our CDN:

<script src="https://cdn.firebase.com/js/client/2.4.2/firebase.js"></script>

Firebase is also available as a Bower dependency via "bower install firebase".

Node.js Setup

The Firebase JavaScript API and the Firebase Node.js API are exactly the same. Firebase clients run just as easily on your servers as they do on end-user devices. We offer a Node.js module which can be installed via npm from the command line:

$ npm install firebase --save

To use the Firebase Node.js module in your application, just require the Firebase client library.

var Firebase = require("firebase");

Read & Write Data

To read and write data to and from a Firebase database, we need to first create a reference to it. We do this by passing the URL of our Firebase app into the Firebase constructor:

var myFirebaseRef = new Firebase("https://<YOUR-FIREBASE-APP>.firebaseio.com/");

There are several other ways to create a reference to a location in our database. These are all explained in our understanding data section.

Writing Data

Once we have a reference to our database, we can write any valid JSON object to it using set(). Our guide on saving data explains the different write methods the API offers and how to know when the data has been successfully written.

myFirebaseRef.set({
  title: "Hello World!",
  author: "Firebase",
  location: {
    city: "San Francisco",
    state: "California",
    zip: 94103
  }
});

Reading Data

Reading data from our database is accomplished by attaching callbacks and handling the resulting events. Assuming we already wrote to myFirebaseRef above, we can retrieve the city value by using the on() method:

myFirebaseRef.child("location/city").on("value", function(snapshot) {
  alert(snapshot.val());  // Alerts "San Francisco"
});

Call val() on the DataSnapshot returned from the callback to access a JSON object.

In the example above, the value event will fire once for the initial state of the data, and then again every time the value of that data changes. You can learn more about the various event types and how to handle event data in our documentation on reading data.

Deploy to Firebase Hosting

Firebase Hosting lets us deploy our application's static files (HTML, CSS, JavaScript, etc.) to the web with a single command. To get started, download firebase-tools via npm:

$ npm install -g firebase-tools

Read through our hosting quickstart to get up and running in minutes. Firebase Hosting is a production-grade service, with security, reliability, and scalability baked-in. We host content on a global CDN and even provision an SSL certificate automatically for you so you can be up-and-running with only the following command:

$ firebase deploy

Paid Firebase apps can serve their files from a custom domain name!

Authenticate Your Users

Firebase provides full support for authenticating users with Email & Password, Facebook, Twitter, GitHub, Google, or your existing authentication system.

To get started with Email & Password auth, enable the Email & Password provider in the App Dashboard:

Choose the Login & Auth tab.
Select the Email & Password tab and enable authentication.

Now that the authentication provider is enabled you can create a new user:

myFirebaseRef.createUser({
  email    : "[email protected]",
  password : "correcthorsebatterystaple"
}, function(error, userData) {
  if (error) {
    console.log("Error creating user:", error);
  } else {
    console.log("Successfully created user account with uid:", userData.uid);
  }
});

Once you've created your first user, you can log them in using the authWithPassword method.

Learn how to authenticate via Facebook, Twitter, Google or your own custom system in our User Authentication guide.

Secure Your Data

Powerful expression-based Security and Firebase Rules provide fine-grained control over who has access to our data and allow us to validate writes to our database data:

{
  "rules": {
    ".read": true,
    ".write": "auth.uid === 'admin'",
    ".validate": "newData.isString() && newData.val().length < 500"
  }
}

Our Security and Firebase Rules are enforced consistently whenever data is accessed. The rules language is designed to be both powerful and flexible, so that you can maintain fine-grained control over your application's data.

Explore Our Bindings

In addition to our core API, we have bindings for AngularJS, Backbone, Ember, and ReactJS which make it even easier to use Firebase with those frameworks.

What's Next?

Read the Development Guide
View the full JavaScript API
Explore our code examples