Nix Firebase

Mar 10, 2025 linux nix firebase
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A quick blog post on using nix with Firebase.

Getting Firebase to work with Nix just requires a few package to get going 😂 If you have worked with Firebase, you know setting up the environment can be royal pain. Never fear, Nix can help with getting you ready to start developing locally.

Firebase provides a fantastic suite of tools for building modern web and mobile applications. Nix enhances this by providing a declarative and reproducible way to manage your deployment pipeline. Use Nix to define your Firebase project dependencies, configuration files, and deployment scripts, ensuring that your applications are always deployed in a consistent and reliable manner. This combination simplifies the process of managing complex Firebase projects and ensures that your applications are always deployed in a predictable and reproducible way.

Firebase Packages

Firebase uses nodejs for its development environment. However it also requires additional packages depending on which Firebase tools you require.

  1. Lets create a shell.nix script
 1with import <nixpkgs> {};
 2
 3pkgs.mkShell {
 4  name = "firebase-dev";
 5
 6  nativeBuildInputs = with pkgs; [
 7    nodejs_20                    # Nodejs 20
 8    nodePackages_latest.webpack  # Webpack support
 9    firebase-tools               # Firebase Tools
10    cacert                       # Support certificates
11  ];
12
13  LANGUAGE = "Firebase";
14  VERSION  = "firebase --version";
15
16  shellHook = ''
17    # Optional: Script environment start up
18    echo "Welcome to $LANGUAGE Development Environment"
19    $VERSION
20  '';
21}

The above script will still give us a firebase development environment complete with a nice message to let us know the shell is running.

In general Firebase will require both nodejs,cacert and firebase-tools. The additional of webpack is optional.

  1. Run a Pure environment

Remember a pure environment tries to ignore the existing host configuration 😂 Nix will automatically look for the file shell.nix so you dont need to added this parameter 🥰

1nix-shell --pure

Expected Output:

1Welcome to Firebase Development Environment
213.35.1

Awesome, Firebase is configured and ready to go!

  1. Exit the Nix Shell
1exit

Nice we now have a super quick and easy way to run Firebase on a Nix machine. Nix will take care of the machine config and setup.