Export specific Firestore subcollection

Question

I am trying to export/import a specific sub-collection in Firestore using the beta version of the firestore export tool.

For example, if I have a setup of

• companies
• companies/{company}/users
• teams
• teams/{team}/users

I want to just get the companies collection and all of its subcollections, I was looking to do:

gcloud beta firestore export gs://my-bucket-name/fs_backups/companies --collection-ids='companies','users'

And I would get companies, companies/{company}/users and teams/{company}/users.

I was trying all of these combos:

... -collection-ids='companies/{id}/users'
... -collection-ids='companies/./users'
... -collection-ids='companies/.*/users'
... -collection-ids='companies/*/users'
... -collection-ids='companies/**/users'
... -collection-ids='companies/__name__/users'

and some other ones as well, but was getting empty (but not failing) results.

Is there a notation for the collection ids to specify the subcollection that I am looking to export?

Answer 1

I ran into the same problem. The issue is that at least two subcollections, in your example, have the name users. The export functionality, when selecting specific collections/subcollections, "flattens" the data (i.e. subcollections will be exported into its own folder, as opposed to a subfolder within the parent collection). This makes subcollections with the same name ambiguous. The fix is to uniquely name subcollections and collections (this will also be helpful if you plan to later import it into BigQuery).