How Setup your first Firebase application

What is firebase?

Firebase is a mobile & web app development program, firstly developed by Firebase, Inc. in 2011. In 2014 firebase is acquired by well known Google.

Why firebase?

Maintaining own servers for app projects is costly these days but more likely its been difficult to work with as beginner.so here is the simplest solution using Firebase SDK. And it’s free till its limit. You can use it for projects in Android, IOS, Web, Unity.

What Firebase Does?

It offers multiple features simple, user-friendly backend platform. like following.

Firebase Cloud Messaging
Firebase Authentication
Firebase Realtime Database
Cloud Firestore
Firebase Storage
Firebase Hosting
Machine Learning

It provides lots of other tools like Crashlytics, Performance, Test Lab, App Distribution.

There are plenty of analytics tools as well as grow tools you can always check on your console panel.

It is very vast topic to start with so without delay just skipping to our topic,

Table of Contents

Create Firebase Account
Create Firebase Project
Create Firebase Application

Create Firebase Account

You can create a Firebase account here.

Create Firebase Project

If you are First time user who doesn’t have any Projects yet click on Create Project.

If you See panel like below simply click on Add Project.

Add Name for your Project in given field And click on Continue.

Step 2 of 4 Click On Continue.

Step 3 of 4 Click On Continue Again.

If you have an existing google analytics account you will see in Dropdown Menu or Just create a new account like below. select create a new account and click Add Firebase.

Add a name to your new analytics account, save it, and then click on Add firebase.

Last step of Setting up your first Firebase Project, Select Location.

Accepting terms by checking boxes,thenclick Add Firebase.

This will setup your project in background you will see the loding screen like below.

Finally, your project is ready. You can see the project name and message “Your new Project is ready”.

Click on Continue to get into your project panel.below image can give you short info about panel.

Congratulations!!! You just Created your first Firebase Project.

Now we look further for How Setup your first Firebase application. In this post, we are going to add an app for the android platform only.

Create Firebase Application

Select your platform to add app (You may Refer above image for selecting your desired platform) in this case we are using android.

Step 1. In Register App, Add yor apps package name

In my case “ com.example.myapplication “

Give a nickname to your app for identification(Optional step). Add your SHA certificate which is also optional but it needed for authentication features provided with firebase like google auth/phone number OTP auth. You can always add/edit it later in settings. If you don’t know how to get SHA Key then you must visit a simple 5 steps she key generation post we have Here.

Then click on register app.

Step 2. Download config file (google-services.json)

Move that google-services.json file from downloaded directory to to your android projects app directory.

Now come back to firebase window and click next.

Step 3. Here you have to add dependencies to android app.

the simple way to get both app-level and project level Gradle files is by selecting android from the dropdown on top left side. And you can see there a directory called Gradle Scripts where both files are located.

Open build.gradle(Project : xxxx) file Project-level

Add dependency

classpath 'com.google.gms:google-services:4.3.3'

Then open build.gradle(Module: App) file App-level

Add apply plugin: 'com.google.gms.google-services' just below of apply plugin: 'com.android.application' .

And to dependencies impliment the firebase SDK to app(library)

implementation 'com.google.firebase:firebase-analytics:17.2.2'

there are many more libraries in firebase SDK you may find them in firebase official documentation. Different libraries needed for different services provided. You can implement them as per your requirements.

after adding necessary things click Sync Now And after sync completed run the app.

Go to browser click next for the 3rd step.

step 4. Here it will try to communicate with our app. You must run your android app with an internet connection. if it takes to much time just reinstalling the app will help.

After successful communication you will see massege.