Installing Firebase in Codeigniter PHP

Codeigniter PHP with Firebase

A while ago, I was struggling to write a query every time to fetch the data in MySQL since it is structured data and I wanted to install Firebase to shift my database into NoSQL structure.

Since there is no official documentation on Firebase for adding into Codeigniter or PHP. In this tutorial, I will let you know the simple steps to get started.

Pre-requisite

1. You have your own CodeIgniter setup complete with basic views, models, and controllers.
2. [Important] You are using Xampp version > 8.0 and PHP version > 8.0

Step 1: Go inside composer.json and add these lines inside “require”

"require": {
    "php": ">=5.3.7",
    "kreait/firebase-php": "^5.26",
    "google/cloud-firestore": "^1.38"
}

Step 2: Open terminal/cmd into your project path and write

composer install

Note — Make sure it installs everything without any error.

Step 3: Go inside index.php and write the below line. It makes sure the libraries installed from the composer can be used in your project.

<?php
require_once __DIR__ . '/vendor/autoload.php';

Step 4: Open the Firebase console and go to Project Overview Settings -> Project Settings -> Service Accounts -> Generate new private key.

This will download a serviceKey.json file which we are going to use in the next step. Store this file inside the application -> config -> serviceKey.json

Step 5: Now create a file inside the application -> libraries -> Firebase.php and write this code in that file.

<?php

use Kreait\Firebase\Factory;

class Firebase {

    protected $firestore;

    public function __construct()
    {
        $serviceAccountPath = APPPATH . 'config/serviceKey.json';

        // Initialize Firebase
        $factory = (new Factory)
            ->withServiceAccount($serviceAccountPath);

        $this->firestore = $factory->createFirestore();
    }

    public function getFirestore()
    {
        return $this->firestore;
    }
}

Step 6: How to use this inside your controller method. So open your controller and write this inside your index() method

  public function index()
  {
    $this->load->library('firebase');
    $firestore = $this->firebase->getFirestore();

    // Reference to a collection
    $collection = $firestore->database()->collection('temp-collection');
    $documents = $collection->documents();

    foreach ($documents as $document) {
         if ($document->exists()) {
             echo 'Document data for document ' . $document->id() . ':' . PHP_EOL;
             print_r($document->data());
             echo PHP_EOL;
         } else {
             echo 'Document ' . $document->id() . ' does not exist!' . PHP_EOL;
         }
    }
    $this->load->view('dashboard');
  }

Open your browser and enter http://localhost/yourcodeignterfoldername/controller

This will give you the JSON result if there is a temp-collection inside your Firestore database.

That’s it. Happy Coding 😁

REFERENCE:

Get data with Cloud Firestore | Firebase

REACH OUT TO ME:

Shubham Agrawal