Firebase Extensions are a convenient way to add new functionality to your app with the click of a button. They are pre-packaged solutions for common problems that you can easily add to your Firebase app. Extensions are based on Firebase and Google Cloud products that you already know and use.
On the Firebase Extensions page, you will find a collection of official extensions for features that developers find themselves in need of regularly, such as resizing images, sending emails based on the contents of Firestore documents, translating text, shortening URLs, and more. Most of these extensions have been built and tested by the Firebase team, and follow best practices. In addition, we have teamed up with partners like Stripe to bring you extensions for processing payments and sending invoices.
Installing extensions is easy via the Firebase console or the Firebase command line interface.
Firebase Experimental Extensions
To allow us to get more feedback from you and to better understand which use cases and extension features people are most interested in, we are launching a new type of extensions: Experimental Extensions.
These are fully functional extensions that we think you’ll find useful, but they haven’t yet gone through the same amount of testing and polish as the official published extensions.
The following extensions are built by our engineers looking for feedback from the community.
- Shortening links using Firebase Dynamic Links
- Performing sentiment analysis on text in Firestore documents
- Adding custom claims to Firebase Auth users
- Scheduled writes to Firestore documents
- … and more coming soon!
To install an experimental extension, navigate to the extension’s README file in the Firebase Experimental Extensions repo on GitHub, and then click on the Install on Firebase button. This will take you to the Firebase Console, where you can then select the project you’d like to install this extension in.
You can also install extensions via the command line. To do so, make sure you’ve got the Firebase Command Line tools installed, then run the following command:
$ firebase ext:install firestore-shorten-urls-dynamic-links --project=(your project ID)
This command will install the Shorten URLs with Dynamic Links experimental extension in your project.
We love to hear your feedback, and we’re looking forward to seeing what you will build using the new experimental extensions! Use the GitHub issue tracker of the experimental extensions repository to leave feedback.
If you’d like to submit PRs to improve an experimental extension, you will need access to the extension authoring tools. To learn more about this, join our Alpha program.
Community Extensions
From conversations with you, we know you’re excited to build and share your own extensions.
To share extensions with other developers, you need to become an Extension Publisher. Register as a publisher by joining the Firebase Alpha program, and indicate you’re interested in building Community Extensions in the comments field. You can then publish your extensions under your publisher ID.
Your extension code will live in Firebase, so other alpha group members can install your extension directly from the command line.
At the moment, Community Extensions can only be shared with members of the Firebase Alpha program, but we’re working hard to let you share your extensions publicly.
To extend where no Firebaser has gone before
We’re excited to share these two new kinds of extensions with you, and we can’t wait to see what you’re going to build!