Only allow writes from service account in Firebase?

Question

I would like make writes to my Firebase data from a node.js server but deny all writes to any other client. Any other client should only be allowed read access. What is the best approach for this? Would I need to authenticate from node.js server with a special admin account and setup a security rule for that specific account or is there some better way to accomplish this? Thanks!

Answer 1

Just use firebase-admin on your server with a service account. It will have Administrative Privileges by default.

And for your rules, all you need is this:

{
  "rules": {
    ".read": true,
  }
}

or this if you only want logged in users to read

{
  "rules": {
    ".read": "auth !== null",
  }
}

Answer 2

In your node server use the Admin SDK to log in with service account

and in the database rules use this:

{
  "rules": {
    ".write": "false"
    ".read": "true",
  }
}