Missing or insufficient permissions when writing to Firestore using field in access rules

Question

I am getting an error when attempting to write to Firestore.

I am attempting to use a field containing the user uid for my security rule.

service cloud.firestore {
  match /databases/{database}/documents {

    match /messages/{document=**} {
      allow read: if resource.data.user_uid == request.auth.uid;
      allow write: if resource.data.user_uid == request.auth.uid;
    }
  }
}

If I have data in my Firestore database, the read rule works fine - but when I attempt to write I get: Error: Missing or insufficient permissions. Is there something I'm doing wrong with this write rule?

P.S. If I change my rule to this, I'm able to write to my database - but this isn't secure enough for my purposes:

 match /messages/{document=**} {
      allow read: if resource.data.user_uid == request.auth.uid;
      allow write: if request.auth != null;
    }

Answer 1

resource.data refers to the data already stored, so your rule allowed users to only update data that already includes their user ID.

What you probably want to check is request.resource.data which is the new data coming in.

There's a rather extensive document about those fields and other security rules here: https://firebase.google.com/docs/firestore/security/rules-conditions

Answer 2

This question and the accepted answer were very useful for me. I ended up using a slightly different set of rules which I'll share here incase someone else finds them useful.

Like the OP, I store a user ID (uid) with my resources. However, when I want to create a new resource, there's no uid yet. Using an example in the documentation I ended up with security rules that look like this:

service cloud.firestore {
  match /databases/{database}/documents {
    match /messages/{document=**} {
      allow read, update, delete: if request.auth.uid == resource.data.uid;
      allow create: if request.auth.uid != null;
    }
  }
}

Answer 3

You can make your database available just for reading and not for writing:

  service cloud.firestore {
    match /databases/{database}/documents {
     match /{document=**} {
       allow read: if true;
       allow write: if false;
      }
   }
}