Introduction to the Firebase CLI

A Command Line Interface (CLI) is an interactive text-based interface that processes commands to a computer program or operating system as lines of text. Through the CLI, users can input text commands into a terminal or a command prompt. Then, a program known as the command-line interpreter or command-line processor handles these commands and returns an appropriate result to users’ commands.

Firebase CLI

Firebase provides a set of tools, available via the Firebase Command Line Interface. These are used to administer Firebase projects. With these tools, developers can view, test, manage, and deploy code and assets to their Firebase projects from the CLI.

Set up the Firebase CLI

To set up the Firebase CLI, we must first install the CLI using our preferred method and then log in to the CLI to access our Firebase projects.

Firebase CLI installation

There are many ways to install the Firebase CLI depending on our operating system, experience level, and/or use case. The most common method is via the Node Package Manager (NPM), which we’ll use in this course.

To use NPM, we must have Node.js installed in our environment. Installing Node.js automatically installs the NPM command tools, therefore allowing us to use them. We can install the Firebase CLI using NPM by running the command below: