How to import data from cloud firestore to the local emulator?
I want to be able to run cloud functions locally and debug against a copy from the production data. Is there a way to copy the data that is online to the local firestore emulator?
Answer
This can be accomplished through a set of commands in terminal on the existing project:
1. Login to firebase and Gcloud:
firebase login
gcloud auth login
2. See a list of your projects and connect to one:
firebase projects:list
firebase use your-project-name
gcloud projects list
gcloud config set project your-project-name
3. Export your production data to gcloud bucket with chosen name:
gcloud firestore export gs://your-project-name.appspot.com/your-choosen-folder-name
4. Now copy this folder to your local machine, I do that in functions folder directly:
cd functions
gsutil -m cp -r gs://your-project-name.appspot.com/your-choosen-folder-name .
5. Now we just want to import this folder. This should work with the basic command, thanks to latest update from Firebase team https://github.com/firebase/firebase-tools/pull/2519.
firebase emulators:start --import ./your-choosen-folder-name
Check out my article on Medium about it and a shorthanded script to do the job for you https://medium.com/firebase-developers/how-to-import-production-data-from-cloud-firestore-to-the-local-emulator-e82ae1c6ed8
Note: Its better to use a different bucket for it, as copying into your project bucket will result in the folder created in your firebase storage.
If you are interested in gsutil arguments like -m, you can see them described by executing gsutil --help.