What is firebase hosting for?

2
votes

What is Firebase Hosting for? Examples? I'm not clear on what it does with respect to hosting a website or server or both....

My understanding of hosting is that one would enlist something like Bluehost or GoDaddy to host a webpage, which they would then upload the website files via an FTP. I see it appears Firebase Hosting may serve a similar purpose and you can add your own domain name like this.

I also understand that websites sometimes require a separate server to do things like: processing requests while keeping secret keys hidden, or rendering a unique webpage server-side and sending a static page to the user. I've used Firebase Realtime Database for non-secure data storage, but I would like to be able to use the hosting as well for serving private user-specific content without exposing keys. I just did a tutorial to create what seemed like a web app that one would query from another webpage, but I wasn't able to deploy and try it out because of the pay-wall.

Can Firebase Hosting be my secondary server that processes private requests to a database or is it only for hosting a user-facing webpage, or both?

I am new to programming and would appreciate hearing if it seems like I am misunderstanding something within my question. Recommended resources for further learning on this subject are greatly appreciated!

Thank you.

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firebasefirebase-hosting

1 Answers

7
votes

Hosting a static web site

Firebase Hosting on its own is a service for hosting static assets. So in your scenario HTML + CSS + Images + JavaScript files that are included in them. None of this content is executed, or in any other way interpreted, on the Firebase servers. You upload (in Firebase terms "deploy") the files to Firebase, which then distributes then to its global CDN edges, and when your site is visited, the content it served from that CDN.

In the Firebase documentation on what can you host this is referred to as:

Host your single-page web apps, marketing websites, and static and dynamic assets

Hosting a static web site with dynamic content

You can use Firebase with many of the other back-end services to add dynamic functionality to your static web site. For example, you can call Realtime Database from your client-side JavaScript code, and display dynamic data in your static web app that way. Firestore would be similar, which you could use in place of Realtime Database. Similarly you can use Firebase to connect to Cloud Storage, for storing of files, for example to allow your users to upload and view images.

And then you'll typically want to secure access to all this dynamic content. At that point, you use Firebase Authentication to allow your users to sign in, and when you'll use Firebase's server-side security rules, which are available for Realtime Database, Cloud Firestore and Cloud Storage. These rules determine what data or files the users can access.

The Firebase documentation covers this in the section on deep integrations with other Firebase products.

Firebase Hosting works out-of-the-box with Firebase services, including Cloud Functions, Authentication, Realtime Database, Cloud Firestore, and Cloud Messaging. You can build powerful microservices and web apps using these complementary Firebase services.

Adding dynamic server-side pieces to web site

You can integrate Firebase Hosting with Google Cloud Functions and Cloud Run to build dynamic web sites. In those scenarios, you host the server-side code on Cloud Run or Cloud Functions, and set Firebase Hosting up to redirect certain URLs to specific end points in your server-side code.

In the Firebase documentation on what can you host this is referred to as:

Pair Firebase Hosting with Cloud Functions to build microservices using the Express.js framework. This pairing allows you to host your microservices and APIs on Firebase.