Configuring Firebase with Angular standalone component

Being that by default (using Angular 17 ✨), generating a component using CLI, we get a standalone component and lack of updated documentation from Firebase I decided to publish my implementation of, in this case, a Real-time database connection.

First of, in my main.ts I initialized the app and analytics

import { bootstrapApplication } from '@angular/platform-browser';
import { appConfig } from './app/app.config';
import { AppComponent } from './app/app.component';
import { initializeApp } from 'firebase/app';
import { firebaseConfig } from '../src/app/environments/environment';
import { getAnalytics } from 'firebase/analytics';

bootstrapApplication(AppComponent, appConfig).catch((err) =>
  console.error(err)
);

const app = initializeApp(firebaseConfig);
const analytics = getAnalytics(app);

Then in my environment.ts I added firebaseConfig (That you get after creating a Web App on Firebase Console)

export const firebaseConfig = {
  apiKey: 'XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX',
  authDomain: 'XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX',
  projectId: 'XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX',
  databaseURL:
    'XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX',
  storageBucket: 'XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX',
  messagingSenderId: 'XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX',
  appId: 'XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX',
  measurementId: 'XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX',
};

And it's pretty much ready to use, with no extra modules import and configuration. In your Component you first import:

import { getDatabase, ref, set } from 'firebase/database';

Then instantiate the database with:

databaseInstance = getDatabase();

and mutate data like so:

saveData(data) {
    set(ref(this.databaseInstance, `/collection`), {
      date: new Date().toISOString(),
      ...data,
    })
      .then(() => {
        this.isSuccess = true;
      })
      .catch((error) => {
        this.isError = true;
        console.log('Failed to save data: ', error);
      });
  }

And that's it, hopefully, it saves someone at least a few minutes of frustration when configuring Firebase with standalone components. If I said something wrong, or you have some extra questions, feel free to write in comments. Cheers🍻

Comments

[Matthew Harris]

I think this is out of date documentation now. The app config can have the providers added in directly, like:

export const appConfig: ApplicationConfig = {
  providers: [
    appRouting,
    provideIonicAngular(),
    provideFirebaseApp(() => initializeApp(environment.firebaseConfig)),
    provideAuth(() => getAuth()),
    provideFirestore(() => getFirestore()),
    // etc
  ],
};

And then you can inject it into your service using the traditional method:

@Injectable({
  providedIn: "root",
})
export class ExampleService {
  constructor(
    private firestore: Firestore
  ) {}
}

or the new inject() method.

The big problem I had which led me to articles like this was that I was getting NullReferenceInjector. Which turned out to be because I was importing from "firebase/firestore" instead of from '@angular/fire/firestore'.