Firebase Android Open Source Development
This repository contains a subset of the Firebase Android SDK source. It currently includes the following Firebase libraries, and some of their dependencies:
firebase-common
firebase-database
firebase-functions
firebase-firestore
firebase-storage
firebase-inappmessaging-display
Firebase is an app development platform with tools to help you build, grow and monetize your app. More information about Firebase can be found at https://firebase.google.com.
Table of contents
Getting Started
- Install the latest Android Studio (should be 3.0.1 or later)
- Clone the repo (
git clone git@github.com:firebase/firebase-android-sdk.git
) - Import the firebase-android-sdk gradle project into Android Studio using the Import project(Gradle, Eclipse ADT, etc. option.
Testing
Firebase Android libraries exercise all three types of tests recommended by the Android Testing Pyramid. Depending on the requirements of the specific project, some or all of these tests may be used to support changes.
Unit Testing
These are tests that run on your machine's local Java Virtual Machine (JVM). At runtime, these tests are executed against a modified version of android.jar where all final modifiers have been stripped off. This lets us sandbox behaviors at desired places and use popular mocking libraries.
Unit tests can be executed on the command line by running
./gradlew :<firebase-project>:check
Integration Testing
These are tests that run on a hardware device or emulator. These tests have access to Instrumentation APIs, give you access to information such as the Android Context. In Firebase, instrumentation tests are used at different capacities by different projects. Some tests may exercise device capabilities, while stubbing any calls to the backend, while some others may call out to nightly backend builds to ensure distributed API compatibility.
Along with Espresso, they are also used to test projects that have UI components.
Project Setup
Before you can run integration tests, you need to add a google-services.json
file to the root of your checkout. You can use the google-services.json
from
any project that includes an Android App, though you'll likely want one that's
separate from any production data you have because our tests write random data.
If you don't have a suitable testing project already:
- Open the Firebase console
- If you don't yet have a project you want to use for testing, create one.
- Add an Android app to the project
- Give the app any package name you like.
- Download the resulting
google-services.json
file and put it in the root of your checkout.
Running Integration Tests on Local Emulator
Integration tests can be executed on the command line by running
./gradlew :<firebase-project>:connectedCheck
Running Integration Tests on Firebase Test Lab
You need additional setup for this to work:
gcloud
needs to be installed on local machinegcloud
needs to be configured with a project that has billing enabledgcloud
needs to be authenticated with credentials that have 'Firebase Test Lab Admin' role
Integration tests can be executed on the command line by running
./gradlew :<firebase-project>:deviceCheck
This will execute tests on devices that are configured per project, if nothing is configured for the
project, the tests will run on model=Pixel2,version=27,locale=en,orientation=portrait
.
Projects can be configured in the following way:
firebaseTestLab {
// to get a list of available devices execute `gcloud firebase test android models list`
devices = [
'<device1>',
'<device2>',
]
}
Annotations
Firebase SDKs use some special annotations for tooling purposes.
@Keep
APIs that need to be preserved up until the app's runtime can be annotated with @Keep. The @Keep annotation is blessed to be honored by android's default proguard configuration. A common use for this annotation is because of reflection. These APIs should be generally discouraged, because they can't be proguarded.
@KeepForSdk
APIs that are intended to be used by Firebase SDKs should be annotated with
@KeepForSdk
. The key benefit here is that the annotation is blessed to throw
linter errors on Android Studio if used by the developer from a non firebase
package, thereby providing a valuable guard rail.
@PublicApi
We annotate APIs that meant to be used by developers with @PublicAPI. This annotation will be used by tooling to help inform the version bump (major, minor, patch) that is required for the next release.
Proguarding
Firebase SDKs do not proguard themselves, but support proguarding. Firebase SDKs themselves are proguard friendly, but the dependencies of Firebase SDKs may not be.
Proguard config
In addition to preguard.txt, projects declare an additional set of proguard rules in a proguard.txt that are honored by the developer's app while building the app's proguarded apk. This file typically contains the keep rules that need to be honored during the app' s proguarding phase.
As a best practice, these explicit rules should be scoped to only libraries whose source code is outside the firebase-android-sdk codebase making annotation based approaches insufficient.The combination of keep rules resulting from the annotations, the preguard.txt and the proguard.txt collectively determine the APIs that are preserved at runtime.
Publishing
Firebase is published as a collection of libraries each of which either represents a top level product, or contains shared functionality used by one or more projects. The projects are published as managed maven artifacts available at Google's Maven Repository. This section helps reason about how developers may make changes to firebase projects and have their apps depend on the modified versions of Firebase.
Dependencies
Any dependencies, within the projects, or outside of Firebase are encoded as
maven dependencies
into the pom
file that accompanies the published artifact. This allows the
developer's build system (typically Gradle) to build a dependency graph and
select the dependencies using its own resolution
strategy
Commands
The simplest way to publish a project and all its associated dependencies is to just publish all projects. The following command builds SNAPSHOT dependencies of all projects. All pom level dependencies within the published artifacts will also point to SNAPSHOT versions that are co-published.
./gradlew publishAllToLocal
Developers may take a dependency on these locally published versions by adding
the mavenLocal()
repository to your repositories
block in
your app module's build.gradle.
For more advanced use cases where developers wish to make changes to a project, but have transitive dependencies point to publicly released versions, individual projects may be published as follows.
# e.g. to publish Firestore and Functions
./gradlew -PprojectsToPublish=":firebase-firestore,:firebase-functions" \
publishProjectsToMavenLocal
Code Formatting
Code in this repo is formatted with the google-java-format tool. You can enable this formatting in Android Studio by downloading and installing the google-java-format plugin.
To run formatting on your entire project you can run
./gradlew :<firebase-project>:googleJavaFormat
Contributing
We love contributions! Please read our contribution guidelines to get started.