How To Implement Firebase For Messenger?

Google Firebase is a mobile application development platform. It can power an application’s backend. The backend of an application includes data storage, user authentication, static hosting, and other functions. It can help you build mobile and web apps that scale from one user to even a million. Firebase can help you build, improve and grow your app.

Firebase is an exhaustively wide-ranging technology for building highly responsive mobile applications. It allows your business to optimize numerous tasks alongside offering quality software development solutions. Using its flexible features, your company can surely build a successful business app.

You can also hire Firebase developers to embrace the spontaneous, dynamic framework features of this technology and build your products to life. 

You Can Also Check Out Our In-depth Video On Developing Messenger Using Firebase Below

What is Firebase Authentication?

Firebase authentication is a feature of user authentication that is provided by Firebase as its backend service. This is a token-based authentication system that provides easy integration with most platforms.

How does Authentication work?

Different ways of  Authentication with Firebase

Social Authentication, widely known as social sign-in, uses social networking platforms’ information to facilitate applications’ logins. This process is designed in a way to simplify login and registration experiences. It provides a better and more convenient alternative to creating a mandatory account creation.

Through authentication, developers can streamline user verification and provide reliable user data for personalization. There are primarily 2 types of authentication possible with Firebase. 

• Firebase UI Authentication Method

Firebase UI Authentication is a way to add a complete sign-in system to the app, where Firebase provides a user interface to them. 

Firebase UI provides a drop-in auth solution that is used to implement authentication on mobile devices and websites.

Firebase UI can be easily customized to fit with the rest of our app’s visual style. It is open-source, so we can change styles as per our requirements.

These are the steps to use Firebase UI Authentication:

• Set up sign-in methods
  • Enable authentication method in the firebase console.
    • For email address and password, phone number sign-in, and any identity providers.
  • Complete the configuration if anyone requires identity providers.
    • Setting our OAuth redirect URL.

• Customize the sign-in UI

• • For customizing the sign-in and UI, set some Firebase UI options or fork the code on GitHub.

• To perform the sign-in flow, use Firebase UI

• • Import the Firebase UI library.
  • Specify the sign-in method which we want to support.
  • Initiate the Firebase UI sign-in flow.

Firebase SDK Authentication- This is another type of method. The Firebase SDK method provides methods for creating and managing users who use their email addresses and password to sign in. SDK also handles sending password reset emails like these other functions.

• We can also provide Email and password authentication using SDK
  • In this method, users can be verified by sending verification emails to your registered email address.
• We can also provide phone number authentication using SDK
  • In this method, users send SMS messages to their phones.
• We can integrate with identity providers.
  • Identity providers use sign-in with their Google, Facebook, Twitter, and GitHub accounts.
• We can connect our app’s existing sign-in system to the Firebase SDK and gain access to the Firebase Real-time database and other Firebase services.
• We can create a temporary anonymous account to use Firebase features.

So these are the methods we have in firebase Authentication.

How To Manage Users with Firebase?

Messaging Database Structure

First, you have to note that Firebase is a NoSQL database, but it does not support data aggregation, unlike MongoDB. Your database is simply a large JSON object

Let’s explore the Messaging Database Structure-

• User Collection
• Contact Collection
• Message Collection

Collection Structure

Cloud Firestore is a NoSQL, document-oriented database. Unlike a SQL database, there are no tables or rows. Instead, you store data in documents, which are organized into collections. Each document contains a set of key-value pairs. Cloud Firestore is optimized for storing large collections of small documents.

• Contact Collection
• Message Collection

Firebase Cloud Messaging Notification

Firebase Cloud Messaging (FCM) provides a reliable and battery-efficient connection between your server and devices that allows you to deliver and receive messages and notifications on iOS, Android, and the web at no cost.

Let’s explore some examples to understand them easily. 

• When someone sends a message to you and at that time you get the notification “that this person has sent you a message” it can be achieved by FCM.
• Sometimes we get notifications from Ubereats swiggy that “ you must be hungry and also you can save 50% ” like this. This can also be achieved by FCM.

There are two types of messages scenario you can do as per your requirement.

-> Notification message and Data message

What are cloud functions?

Google Cloud Functions is a serverless execution environment for building and connecting cloud services. With Cloud Functions, you write simple, single-purpose functions that are attached to events emitted from your cloud infrastructure and services.

• Backend code
• Triggered automatically through Firebase events or HTTPS events. Supports action like Authentication
• Integration with other firebase features – tools like Firestore, Firebase Storage
• Programmed in Node JS environment

What can cloud functions do?

With Cloud Functions, you write simple, single-purpose functions that are attached to events emitted from your cloud infrastructure and services. Your function is triggered when an event being watched is fired.

• Writes to real-time database
• Uploads to the storage bucket
• New user authentication
• Firebase Cloud Messaging
• HTTPS request

How do you create a function?

• Create a Firebase Project
• Set up NodeJS (Install node v8 or +)
• Integrate Firebase Tools: $ npm install -g firebase-tools
• Login to Firebase: $ firebase login
• Logout to Firebase : $ firebase logout
• Refresh Firebase Token : $ firebase login –reauth
• Initialize project: $ firebase init

• Initialize your project

• Languages to write functions: JavaScript & TypeScript
• Languages to write functions: $ firebase serve –only functions
• Deploy functions to the production environment.
• Command: $ firebase deploy –only functions

Notification Message Payload

const payload = {

  notification: {

    title: 'New Message',

    body: 'Hello World'

  }

};

Complete Example With Notification