Add/Set collection in Firestore with the Firebase Admin SDK : Python 🐍

The Admin SDK lets you interact with Firebase from privileged environments to perform actions like:

·         Read and write Realtime Database data with full admin privileges.

·         Programmatically send Firebase Cloud Messaging messages using a simple, alternative approach to the FCM server protocols.

·         Generate and verify Firebase auth tokens.

·         Access Google Cloud Platform resources like Cloud Storage buckets and Firestore databases associated with your Firebase projects.

·         Create your own simplified admin console to do things like look up user data or change a user's email address for authentication.

Currently Node.js, Java, Python, Go, C# are supported languages in Admin SDK.

This tutorial demonstrates adding collection in Firestore database through Admin SDK.

Few things to note:

1.       You cannot create an empty collection in Firestore with Admin SDK to create so, you need to login to Firestore console and add it manually.

2.       Your system needs Python 2.7+ or 3.x.

3.       You need to generate Firebase Admin SDK jason key to use in your python application.

4.       Also you need to install firebase-admin SDK in your system in python environment.

To do so run pip install firebase-admin command in your command prompt (This step is to be performed after Python installation completes)

 To generate jason key perform the following steps:

1.       If you don't already have a Firebase project, add one in the Firebase console. The Add project dialog also gives you the option to add Firebase to an existing Google Cloud Platform project.

2.       Navigate to the Service Accounts tab in your project's settings page.

3.       Click the Generate New Private Key button at the bottom of the Firebase Admin SDK section of the Service Accounts tab.

4.       After you click the button, a JSON file containing your service account's credentials will be downloaded.

The jason file contains sensitive information, including your service account's private encryption key. Keep it confidential and never store it in a public repository.

Once you have done all setup we can proceed to our objective i.e. create collection in Firestore database using python

Rename the jason file to ServiceAccountKey.json and copy in the directory in which your python code is saved

Following is the code to setup Firestore client

import firebase_admin from firebase_admin

import credentials,firestore

creed=credentials.Certificate('./ServiceAccountKey.json')

default_app=firebase_admin.initialize_app(creed)

db=firestore.client()

Since you cannot create a Firestore empty collection, we will create a collection with a document

In our example our collection name would be example_collection and our document name would be example_document in which there would be a string object test.

db.collection(u'example_collection').document(u'example_document').set({

          u'test':'hello World'

})

Run the following code and make sure your system has an active internet connection with the following command in the command prompt with path to the python file.

(Note in our example python file name is demo)

python demo.py

Congratulation!! You have successfully created a python application with Admin SDK to create a Firestore collection.

All the Firestore database and Firebase Admin SDK operations are subject to billing as per usage. Please read the pricing information of required entities on Google official site for Cloud products and perform your task at your own risk.