Continuous deployment to Firebase hosting using Travis CI

Intro

Last night I had another multi million dollar web app idea. So of course first thing I do in the morning is start to work on my idea. Got to earn those dollars.

The first thing I need is some place on the internet where my customers can start handing me over their money. I want to move fast, so each time I change something I want to see the results immediately.

Enablers

Firebase is a platform by Google that provides hosting with minimal effort and for free. Travis is a hosted continuous integration solution that will allow me to deploy my changes to Firebase. GitHub is the place where I’ll be storing my precious code.

To build this stuff I installed Node.js and Docker on my laptop. I didn’t really need Docker but I did not feel like installing Ruby.

Let’s go to work

• Go to Firebase and create a new project.
• Create a new repository on GitHub.
• Clone the repository locally.
• Create a minimal index.html.

mkdir public
touch public/index.html

• Connect GitHub repository to Firebase project using the Firebase tools. Don’t overwrite index.html when initializing.

npm install -g firebase-tools
firebase login
firebase init 

• Generate a Firebase CI token (and keep it handy).

firebase login:ci

• Go to Travis and activate the GitHub repository.
• Encrypt the Firebase CI token using Travis CLI.

# only run the docker command if you don't have and don't want to install Ruby
docker run -it --rm ruby:latest bash
gem install travis
travis encrypt "1/firebase_CI_token" -r githubusername/reponame

• Create a .travis.yml file to deploy to Firebase after every push to GitHub.

language: node_js
node_js:
  - "node"
script:
  -
deploy:
  provider: firebase
  token:
    secure: "encrypted_firebase_CI_token"

• Commit and push the changes to GitHub.
• Watch Travis build and deploy.
• Check Firebase Hosting to see the deployment history.
• Go to the Firebase Hosting domain for the project to see the website.

Conclusion

I just spent half a day on writing a guide on continuously deploying a website to Firebase using Travis CI and I didn’t start working on my multi million dollar idea.

Find the code on GitHub.

See the website here.