Practical Guide to FlutterFire

If you’re a Flutter developer who wants to expand your skills to include full-stack development.

Then you’ll need to understand how to link backend services. Firebase is by far the most popular database for Flutter.

Although there are many career opportunities associated with this new framework, qualified developers are in short supply. So it’s past time for us to improve our skills and take advantage of those possibilities as soon as feasible.

In this post, we will Flutterfire, Firebase, and how you can add Firebase to a Flutter app with FlutterFire CLI. Let’s begin. 

Understanding FlutterFire

Google’s Flutter is a UI toolkit for creating cross-platform apps. Flutter is compatible with Android, iOS, Windows, Linux, and Mac. It is a free and open-source toolkit for creating aesthetically attractive applications.

The main advantage of utilizing Flutter as a backend with Firebase is that it provides a rich set of application management features.

Firebase is a supplier of Backend-as-a-Service (Baas). It provides a variety of tools and services to developers to assist them in creating high-quality apps, expanding their user base, and profiting. It is built on Google’s infrastructure.

Firebase will provide everything a business needs in one place, from cloud storage to real-time databases, hosting to authentication services. FlutterFire is a set of plugins that enable Flutter programs to use Firebase Services.

Firebase tools

• Real-time Database: A NoSQL database supplied by Firebase to store and sync data amongst your users in real-time. It is also geared for offline use.
• Cloud Firestore: A Realtime Database upgrade. It teaches the ideas of collections and documents in a new and more intuitive data model. It also has richer, quicker searches and scales more than the Realtime Database, both in terms of performance and cost.
• Authentication: Firebase also makes it easy to authenticate with many services or platforms, including but not limited to email password, phone number, Google, Facebook, Twitter, and GitHub login.
• Cloud Storage: Firebase’s storage service. It is inexpensive, effective, and simple to implement.
• Remote configuration: A cloud service that allows you to change the functionality or look of your app without forcing users to download an update
• App Distribution: This allows you to rapidly and easily distribute your app build to testers.

Hands-on with FlutterFire 

Using Flutterfire to add Firebase to the Flutter app. 

1. Installation

Ensure that the Firebase CLI is installed on your computer.

Use the following command to install the FlutterFire CLI:

2. Creating a brand-new Flutter app

Now we’ll create a new Flutter application.

By default, the main function of this program will begin with the following code

3. Establishing a new Firebase project

When Flutterfire is creating the product, it periodically runs into problems like these. Simply type the project name into the Firebase UI and disable Google Analytics because we won’t be using it.

4. Using the FlutterFire CLI to add a Firebase project

We can now return to the command line and run: once the Firebase project has been created and configure Flutterfire. 

A list of all active Firebase projects can be found here:

Now we can pick and enter the project we just established. We’ll then be able to decide which platforms to support:

For each platform we require, the CLI will construct a Firebase app.

5. We’ll set up Firebase in the Flutter app.

Following the completion of the preceding step, we’ll create a new file named firebase options.dart in the lib folder. We’ll need to add firebase core in our ‘pubspec.yaml’ at the very least:

The initialization code can then be added to the main.dart file.

Now, We’ve finished all of the configuration steps, and our app should now work on Android, iOS, and the web.

Conclusion

Finally, FlutterFire provides a set of unique Flutter plugins that allow Flutter developers to create fully functioning cross-platform apps.

FlutterFire is only getting started, and there are still a lot of things that need to be added to the developer’s bucket.