How to start the Firebase Realtime database emulator with open rules?

Question

I start the emulator with the following command:

firebase emulators:start --project my_remote_project_id --only database,functions --inspect-functions

When I go to the locale console (http://localhost:4001/database), I can see 2 databases:

• my_remote_project_id
• fake-server

When I go to http://localhost:9000/.inspect/coverage?ns=my_remote_project_id, I can see that the rules are the ones for my remote project. When I go to http://localhost:9000/.inspect/coverage?ns=fake-server, the rules are open:

{
    "rules": {
        ".read": true,
        ".write": true
    }
}

Because of the rules on my_remote_project_id database, I cannot import the json I want to test. I can do it though on the fake-server database. The issue is that the cloud functions get triggered only on the my_remote_project_id one, and never on the fake-server one.

Am I missing something?

I start the app using admin.initializeApp() and exported export FIREBASE_DATABASE_EMULATOR_HOST="localhost:9000"

I can always remove the rules from the remote project (dev environment) but it's not ideal at all.

Answer 1

For you to be able to use different security rules for your emulator, you can use different files. This way, you will have one file for your emulator and one for production, so you don't have to worry in your tests.

You can achieve that by configuring a different set of rules in the firebase.json rules of the emulator. You can find more information on how to do it here.