Firestore Data Population Guide¶

Archived record

This page describes the Firebase-era platform or a migration step that has completed. It is kept as history and is not a current runbook. The current platform is described from the home page.

Prerequisites¶

Firebase Service Account Key
Go to Firebase Console → Project Settings → Service Accounts
Click "Generate New Private Key"
Save the JSON file as firebase-service-account.json in the project root
IMPORTANT: Add this file to .gitignore (already done)
Install Firebase Admin SDK
```
npm install firebase-admin --save-dev
```

Running the Population Script¶

# Run the script
node scripts/populate-firestore.cjs

What Gets Populated¶

The script creates the following Firestore structure:

firestore/
├── aws/
│   ├── blog/
│   │   └── articles/
│   │       ├── multi-region-resilient-architectures
│   │       └── aws-cost-optimization-2026
│   └── architectures/
│       └── designs/
│           └── multi-tier-web-application
├── azure/
│   ├── blog/
│   │   └── articles/
│   │       └── azure-landing-zones-enterprise
│   └── architectures/
│       └── designs/
│           └── hub-spoke-network-topology
├── gcp/
│   ├── blog/
│   │   └── articles/
│   │       └── building-ml-pipelines-vertex-ai
│   └── architectures/
│       └── designs/
│           └── data-lake-cloud-storage
└── metadata/
    └── stats

Document Schema¶

Blog Article¶

{
  slug: string,
  title: string,
  description: string,
  content: string (HTML),
  author: string,
  date: string,
  category: string,
  tags: string[],
  readTime: number,
  published: boolean,
  createdAt: timestamp
}

Architecture Design¶

{
  slug: string,
  title: string,
  description: string,
  overview: string (HTML),
  category: string,
  complexity: string,
  tags: string[],
  estimatedCost: string,
  terraformCode: string (optional),
  diagramUrl: string (optional),
  published: boolean,
  createdAt: timestamp
}

Firestore Security Rules¶

Ensure your firestore.rules allows read access:

rules_version = '2';
service cloud.firestore {
  match /databases/{database}/documents {
    // Allow public read for published content
    match /{provider}/{contentType}/{collection}/{document} {
      allow read: if resource.data.published == true;
    }

    // Allow authenticated users to write
    match /{document=**} {
      allow write: if request.auth != null;
    }
  }
}

Troubleshooting¶

Error: "Cannot find module 'firebase-admin'"¶

npm install firebase-admin --save-dev

Error: "Cannot find service account file"¶

Ensure firebase-service-account.json exists in project root
Or set environment variable: FIREBASE_SERVICE_ACCOUNT_PATH=/path/to/key.json

Error: "Permission denied"¶

Check that your service account has Firestore write permissions
Verify Firebase project ID in the service account JSON

Next Steps¶

After populating Firestore:

Update useFirestore hook paths to match collection structure
Deploy Firestore security rules: firebase deploy --only firestore:rules
Test data fetching in the application
Add more content as needed