Firebase CLI and MCP Server

The Firebase Command Line Interface (CLI) Tools can be used to test, manage, and deploy your Firebase project from the command line. This repository is also the home of the official Firebase MCP Server. For more information, please see the Firebase MCP Server documentation.

• Deploy code and assets to your Firebase projects

• Run a local web server for your Firebase Hosting site

• Interact with data in your Firebase database

• Import/Export users into/from Firebase Auth

To get started with the Firebase CLI, read the full list of commands below or check out the documentation.

Installation

Node Package

You can install the Firebase CLI using npm (the Node Package Manager). Note that you will need to install Node.js and npm. Installing Node.js should install npm as well.

To download and install the Firebase CLI run the following command:

npm install -g firebase-tools

This will provide you with the globally accessible firebase command.

Standalone Binary

The standalone binary distribution of the Firebase CLI allows you to download a firebase executable without any dependencies.

To download and install the CLI run the following command:

curl -sL firebase.tools | bash

Related MCP server: Firebase Live MCP Server

Commands

The command firebase --help lists the available commands and firebase <command> --help shows more details for an individual command.

If a command is project-specific, you must either be inside a project directory with an active project alias or specify the Firebase project id with the -P <project_id> flag.

Below is a brief list of the available commands and their function:

Configuration Commands

Append --no-localhost to login (i.e., firebase login --no-localhost) to copy and paste code instead of starting a local server for authentication. A use case might be if you SSH into an instance somewhere and you need to authenticate to Firebase on that machine.

Project Management Commands

Deployment and Local Emulation

These commands let you deploy and interact with your Firebase services.

App Distribution Commands

Auth Commands

Detailed doc is here.

Realtime Database Commands

Extensions Commands

Cloud Firestore Commands

Cloud Functions Commands

Hosting Commands

Remote Config Commands

Use firebase:deploy --only remoteconfig to update and publish a project's Firebase Remote Config template.

Authentication

General

The Firebase CLI can use one of four authentication methods listed in descending priority:

• User Token - DEPRECATED: this authentication method will be removed in a future major version of firebase-tools; use a service account to authenticate instead - provide an explicit long-lived Firebase user token generated from firebase login:ci. Note that these tokens are extremely sensitive long-lived credentials and are not the right option for most cases. Consider using service account authorization instead. The token can be set in one of two ways:

  • Set the --token flag on any command, for example firebase --token="<token>" projects:list.

  • Set the FIREBASE_TOKEN environment variable.

• Local Login - run firebase login to log in to the CLI directly as yourself. The CLI will cache an authorized user credential on your machine.

• Service Account - set the GOOGLE_APPLICATION_CREDENTIALS environment variable to point to the path of a JSON service account key file. For more details, see Google Cloud's Getting started with authentication guide.

• Application Default Credentials - if you use the gcloud CLI and log in with gcloud auth application-default login, the Firebase CLI will use them if none of the above credentials are present.

Multiple Accounts

By default firebase login sets a single global account for use on all projects. If you have multiple Google accounts which you use for Firebase projects you can authorize multiple accounts and use them on a per-project or per-command basis.

To authorize an additonal account for use with the CLI, run firebase login:add. You can view the list of authorized accounts with firebase login:list.

To set the default account for a specific Firebase project directory, run firebase login:use from within the directory and select the desired account. To check the default account for a directory, run firebase login:list and the default account for the current context will be listed first.

To set the account for a specific command invocation, use the --account flag with any command. For example firebase --account=user@domain.com deploy. The specified account must have already been added to the Firebase CLI using firebase login:add.

Cloud Functions Emulator

The Cloud Functions emulator is exposed through commands like emulators:start, serve and functions:shell. Emulated Cloud Functions run as independent node processes on your development machine which means they have their own credential discovery mechanism.

By default these node processes are not able to discover credentials from firebase login. In order to provide a better development experience, when you are logged in to the CLI through firebase login we take the user credentials and construct a temporary credential that we pass into the emulator through GOOGLE_APPLICATION_CREDENTIALS. We only do this if you have not already set the GOOGLE_APPLICATION_CREDENTIALS environment variable yourself.

Using behind a proxy

The CLI supports HTTP(S) proxies via environment variables. To use a proxy, set the HTTPS_PROXY or HTTP_PROXY value in your environment to the URL of your proxy (e.g. HTTP_PROXY=http://127.0.0.1:12345).

Using with CI Systems

The Firebase CLI requires a browser to complete authentication, but is fully compatible with CI and other headless environments.

Complete the following steps to run Firebase commands in a CI environment. Find detailed instructions for each step in Google Cloud's Getting started with authentication guide.

1. Create a service account and grant it the appropriate level of access to your project.

2. Create a service account key (JSON file) for that service account.

3. Store the key file in a secure, accessible way in your CI system.

4. Set GOOGLE_APPLICATION_CREDENTIALS=/path/to/key.json in your CI system when running Firebase commands.

To disable access for the service account, find the service account for your project in the Google Cloud Console, and then either remove the key, or disable or delete the service account.

Using as a Module

The Firebase CLI can also be used programmatically as a standard Node module. Each command is exposed as a function that takes positional arguments followed by an options object and returns a Promise.

So if we run this command at our command line:

$ firebase --project="foo" apps:list ANDROID

That translates to the following in Node:

const client = require("firebase-tools");
client.apps
  .list("ANDROID", { project: "foo" })
  .then((data) => {
    // ...
  })
  .catch((err) => {
    // ...
  });

The options object must be the very last argument and any unspecified positional argument will get the default value of "". The following two invocations are equivalent:

const client = require("firebase-tools");

// #1 - No arguments or options, defaults will be inferred
client.apps.list();

// #2 - Explicitly provide "" for all arguments and {} for options
client.apps.list("", {});

Note: when used in a limited environment like Cloud Functions, not all firebase-tools commands will work programatically because they require access to a local filesystem.