Test Repository for Nuxt-VueFire on Vercel / Firebase / Local

WARNING: the directory name test-nuxt-vuefire-ssr for some reason has the whole thing breaking and throwing errors. Rename the main folder to test-ssr and it works. I have no idea why this is the case but it is.

Discussion on the VueFire repo made me try to test and see how to achieve SSR on Vercel, Firebase, and localhost.

This repo is a demonstration of how to do this and how to configure the Google serviceAccount without having the file in your repositroy and the private key exposed.

Please note that I am not a security researcher and I do not guarantee that the PRIVATE KEY does not show up in any public facing files.

From what I can tell, the way the deploy works the server side serviceAccount is not available in the frontend javascript files.

Additional learnings about the login methods for social logins (Google Auth tested) are blow.

Setup / Learnings

Generally, the workaround is that we have to set GOOGLE_APPLICATION_CREDENTIALS to something. This is, because, there is a check in the vuefire codebase for the service account credentials based on this environment variable.

When the variable is present, other checks are performed and thus the env variables like FIREBASE_PRIVATE_KEY are used (only if the GOOGLE_APPLICATION_CREDENTIALS is present).

The other thing to note is that we have to link a few FIREBASE_API_ID variables in the nuxt.config.ts file. This is so they are configurable via environment variables but at the same time are available at build time for the frontend.

My understanding is that the frontend keys are not so "valuable" / "secret" since they are exposed to the browser anyways.

Vercel

You provide all the firebase serviceAccount and front end api keys in the environment variable. See .env.vercel for all the necessary env variables.

Note that the .env.vercel or any .env for that matter has to be deployed to Github for this to work! All the .env* stuff can be setup in the Vercel UI.

In Vercel the Environment Variables section I setup all of these:

GOOGLE_APPLICATION_CREDENTIALS
FIREBASE_PROJECT_ID
FIREBASE_CLIENT_EMAIL
FIREBASE_PRIVATE_KEY
FIREBASE_API_KEY
FIREBASE_AUTH_DOMAIN
FIREBASE_STORAGE_BUCKET
FIREBASE_MESSAGING_SENDER_ID
FIREBASE_APP_ID

In Vercel the Build & Development Settings are setup as follows for my env:

Build Command: pnpm build:vercel
Output Directory: .vercel
Install Command: pnpm install

Firebase

Firebase deploy is a bit different since we have to build locally (unless you are using some github action setup but then the deploy would be more like the one on vercel).

You should also create your own .firebaserc file. I included an example file.

So, I got it workign via:

Run Locally: pnpm build:firebase
Settings in firebase.json and .firebaserc (have a look into the files for pointers).
Deploy via: pnpm deploy:firebase

Local Development

For local development I was able to set it up by creating a .env.local file which includes basically all the things the env needs to run like Vercel.

Then I have the pnpm dev and pnpm build:local use the .env.local via the --dotenv .env.local flag.

This leads to the local development connecting to the live auth / firestore for everything.

The setup with local emulators can then also be achieved, though this is not something I tested at this time.

Learnigns about SignIn by Redirect / PopUp

The redirect method works fine in chrome. But there aer some issues with the login when using other browsers that are more strict with their cookies and policies? Not exactly sure.

But signInWithPopup works fine in Safari, Firefox, and Chrome.

Whereas signInWithRedirect works in Chrome and the others probably would work with a strict setup following the best practices from Firebase Auth layed out here.

Long story short: the easiest method is to use signInWithPopup and not worry about the redirect method when deploying on Vercel.