Today’s EmberFire release includes new features that will make it even easier for Ember developers to connect their apps to Firebase. The EmberFire 1.5.0 release brings Ember Data 1.13.0 compatibility, integration with Firebase Authentication, and some updates for embedded records.

What is EmberFire?

EmberFire is an adapter for using Firebase with Ember Data. It is packaged as an Ember CLI addon, which makes it incredibly easy to add Firebase as the backend for your Ember app. Using EmberFire, all of your models stored in Ember Data will be automatically synchronized with our remote Firebase database. Simply calling save() on a record will save it to the store and persist that data in your Firebase database.

New Features in EmberFire 1.5.0

Ember Data 1.13.0 Compatibility

Ember Data has made it out of beta, which means we can count on a stable API. This is great news for EmberFire. In addition to 1.13.0 compatibility, we’re working on staying up to date with the latest releases, and our tests are also passing for 2.0 canary!

Torii Authentication

You can now authenticate users in your EmberFire app with Facebook, Twitter, GitHub, and Google using our Torii adapter. Get started by enabling the authentication provider you’d like to use in your Firebase Dashboard, installing the Torii addon, and following the authentication section in our guide. Once you’ve set it up, you can authenticate a user inside your route or controller with the following snippet:

this.get("session").open("firebase", { provider: "twitter"})
  .then(function(data) {
    console.log(data.currentUser);
  });

This snippet of code will authenticate a user with Twitter and log the returned user object to the console.

Many thanks to Matt Sumner for his work on this.

Embedded Record Changes

This release also changes the way embedded records are declared. If you have an embedded hasMany / belongsTo relationship in your EmberFire app, you should now follow the Ember Data conventions by configuring embedded record settings in a serializer. Visit the relationships section of our guide for details. Just be sure to use Ember Data 1.13.6+ for embedded records compatibility.

Getting Started

If you’re new to EmberFire, using it with your Ember CLI app is as simple as installing our addon:

ember install emberfire

Then, update your Firebase URL in config/environment.js and you’re ready to persist your Ember Data records in your Firebase database. Check out our guide for a detailed walkthrough on all things EmberFire.

We’d love to hear what you think of the latest release. Post any feedback in our Ember Google Group, or open an issue on GitHub. Contributions to EmberFire are always welcome, so feel free to submit a pull request if there’s something you’d like to see added.

We’re excited to see what you build with Firebase and Ember!