Firebase App Hosting is a secure, serverless framework that provides hosting for server-rendered web apps. Since our public preview launch at Google I/O this year, we’ve been working hard to expand our feature set.
We’re excited to announce that you can now deploy apps to Asia (and Europe in a few days) with Firebase App Hosting! In addition to new regions, App Hosting has a new CLI command to manually create rollouts, giving developers more flexibility with deployments. More regions and CLI deployments were two of our top feature requests on User Voice.
Keep reading for more details!
Deploy your web app to regions across the globe
When you deploy your web app using App Hosting, we create your backend resource in a specific location. We launched at Google I/O with support for backends in us-central1
(Iowa), we’ve recently expanded to include asia-east1
(Taiwan), with europe-west4
(Netherlands) coming online in the next few days.
You can choose any of these regions when you create an App Hosting backend from the console.
Or, with firebase apphosting:backends:create ‑‑project PROJECT_ID ‑‑location REGION
using the Firebase CLI.
Your default domain name will look like BACKEND_ID--PROJECT_ID.REGION.hosted.app
.
This flexibility in where you want to deploy your web app has several advantages including:
- Improved performance and reduced latency by bringing the data geographically closer to your users
- A catastrophic failure for Firebase App Hosting deployed in one region will not affect web apps deployed in other regions
Manually trigger a rollout from the CLI
App Hosting integrates with GitHub to enable automatic rollouts when changes are pushed/merged into your live branch. While automatic rollouts are generally considered best practice, there are times where you might want more control over when changes are rolled out to production. For example, you might want to roll out to production only on certain days of the week. Or maybe you want to programmatically trigger rollouts from your own CI/CD system, instead of through GitHub events.
Firebase App Hosting now lets you trigger rollouts from your GitHub repo on demand using the Firebase CLI, a feature that was previously only available in the Firebase console. This CLI command gives you the flexibility to integrate App Hosting into your own CI/CD setup, instead of using App Hosting’s automatic rollouts feature.
You can start a rollout for the latest commit for a given branch with firebase apphosting:rollouts:create BACKEND_ID ‑‑git-branch SOME_BRANCH ‑‑location SOME_REGION
You can also create a rollout with a **specific commit **with firebase apphosting:rollouts:create BACKEND_ID ‑‑git-commit COMMIT_ID ‑‑location SOME_REGION
Or, interactively pick a branch with firebase apphosting:rollouts:create BACKEND_ID
Sneak peek: The App Hosting emulator
In the coming weeks, we’ll be rolling out the App Hosting emulator to enhance your local development experience with Firebase. Stay tuned!
A look behind the scenes of Firebase App Hosting
Firebase App Hosting is built on top of some of our favorite Google Cloud products. If you’d like to demystify the Firebase magic and learn about what happens behind the scenes when you deploy with App Hosting, check out our talk from the Google Cloud Summit London.
Steady improvements
We’re constantly listening to your feedback on ways to improve App Hosting. Here are some other features and fixes we’ve rolled out:
- New: Added support for initializing your project by CLI via
firebase init apphosting
- New: The console dashboard page for a specific backend will continually poll for status when a rollout is in progress, and in-progress rollouts for all backends are highlighted in the overview page
- New: New backends will have their Cloud Run settings dynamically scaled based on project quotas
- New: Next.js 15 is out with new and exciting features give it a spin on Firebase App Hosting today!
What’s next?
Expect support for more regions across the globe soon and regular updates to our feature set. We hope that these new features will enhance your experience with App Hosting and we’re excited to see what you build. If you haven’t already, head over to the Firebase console and explore our documentation to deploy your first app.
As always, if you have questions, you can hit us up on any of our support channels, or post questions on Stack Overflow. And if you have ideas for any new features, let us know on User Voice!