How do I persist user authentication using the Firebase refresh token?

Question

I am building a React Native app which uses Firebase phone authentication for user login. Authentication works fine but the token expires after an hour. I have read that I need to use the refresh token to refresh the idToken, but nowhere on the Firebase docs does it explain how to do this. It only explains how to revoke refresh tokens, and I can't even find it.

I am using the react-native-firebase package.

My questions are: how to I get the refresh token, how do I use it, and do I really need to call Firebase every hour to update my idToken?

I am currently getting my idToken like this:

const authenticate = async (credential) => {
  try {
    const { user } = await firebase.auth().signInWithCredential(credential);
    const accessToken = await user.getIdToken();
    return accessToken;
  } catch (error) {
    console.log(error);
  }
}

I then take the token and store it locally using AsyncStorage and check if the token exists every time the app is launched.

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

From https://rnfirebase.io/reference/auth/user#getIdToken It seems that using user.getIdToken() refresh the token if it has expired. You can always use the forceRefresh option if you want to refresh the token even if it's still valid.