Firebase Authentication Example

Getting Started & Running The Project

Make sure you have Node.js 20 installed. To help manage multiple node versions simultaneously, see NVM.
run npm install at the root of the project

Create a file named .env at the root of the project.
This file is ignored by git and contains the environment variables necessary to hold authentication secrets and other configuration values.
The first set of values can be obtained by creating a firebase project and registering your app.
The second set of firebase values are required for firebase admin operations (verifying tokens and changing passwords). These can be obtained by navigating to your project on firebase, clicking the gear icon next to "Project Overview", clicking "Project Settings" and finally generating a private key under the "Accounts" tab.
Finally, the NEXT_PUBLIC_API_URL value is simply the hosting domain of the application, which is http://localhost:3000 when running locally.

Linting & Unit tests have been set up in GitHub actions
Additionally, automatic tagging through semantic release takes effect on every passing push to main
This eliminates the toil of manual versioning and works based on conventional commits

While it would be possible to create a separate back end project with a library such as express and set up a development proxy for the front end to access, Next.js offers a much more streamlined approach to developing full-stack web apps.
Additionally, it offers built-in sass support (with the ability to utilize tailwind css as well).
It also defaults to server-rendered components, which can improve speed and search engine discovery.
Finally, it offers server-side navigation and page protection, which is superior to client-side route protection in terms of ease of development and end-user experience.

While firebase technically supports client-side authentication, bundling credentials (even though they are regarded non-sensitive in the case of firebase) is a poor design decision and allows for potential abuse.
Therefore, API routes were created to interface with back end services and securely store credentials in environment variables.

There is nothing inherently firebase specific about the vast majority of this application.
All firebase operations have been implemented behind a UserManagementService interface.
In the future, any back end implementing this interface could be used.
A similar dependency inversion has been implemented for email and password validation.