Why are my Firebase Functions deploys (from the Netherlands) failing?

Question

Update: The problems passed for a while, but then returned with a vengeance since yesterday. Deploys now really take forever and always fail with Server Error. connect ETIMEDOUT or Upload Error: Cannot read property 'response' of undefined or something else.

After experimenting with connecting via a US location using HideMyAss I found that that completely resolved my issues though! Note that this issue not only occurs when deploying from our office in Amsterdam, but also from our office in Rotterdam. In the meanwhile I have also heard from more people experiencing issues with other Google services.

I have replied to the related Firebase Support email with this information and hope they will look into it. In the meanwhile I guess I'll have to keep on using HideMyAss..

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Deploying Functions has been taking increasingly longer times after adding more of them. Occasionally at first, but recently for some periods every time I try to $ firebase deploy --only functions one of the functions being deployed at random fails with:

⚠ functions[foo]: Deploy Error: Failure in the execution environment

When I try again an hour or so later it deploys without a problem (still takes 2 minutes to deploy which seems a little slow).

Perhaps the deploy process is timing out; it always fails after a long time, never quickly.

Perhaps my location outside of America is resulting in latency related issues in the deployment process? Doesn't seem very likely though..

I'm also looking into Firebase Functions logging "Function execution took 60002 ms, finished with status: 'timeout'" and other performance issues, so I wonder if these are all related.

PS: I also reported this to https://firebase.google.com/support/ but the last report I made there is still un-answered after 15 days, so I'm going to go ahead and post it here as well. I included a firebase-debug.log with that report, but rather not publicly sharing that here (not sure if there any tokens in there etc).

Answer 1

Also having issues

I have been having similar issues today and I am deploying from the United States.

For example a function will fail showing these two errors:

Deploy Error: Failure in the execution environment
Error: Functions did not deploy properly.

I found that once when this happened it was because my internet connection was dropping and then totally dropped during a firebase deploy.

Then again it happened because I was trying to deploy at the exact same time that at lot of my cloud functions happened to kick off doing stuff on their servers.

Once the cloud function had failed, then even when my internet resumed and my functions weren't busily running, it would not let me redeploy to get the jammed function running again. No matter what the broken copy of it was stuck in their servers with the tag:

Failure in execution environment

My Solution

I found that once you have a problem like that you can actually rename the function. On the next deploy it will effectively delete the old broken function and reload it as a working copy with the new name.

I would think if your project required it to have the same name you could do this process one more time, deleting the copy with the new name and restoring the copy with the name you needed. Or even block commenting out the function to delete it on the first deploy and then uncommenting it on another deploy to reinstall it.

How that helps you

I'm hoping that if you are still having issues from the Netherlands it is helpful to know that it may be a slow connection issue or a busy server issue. As I have found these two things to cause problems for me from within the States.

Also my solution of deleting and redeploying the function might help to speed up a deploy if the issue is with a copy that is on their servers. It would be interesting to know if that helps because even though the function looks ok on the server maybe it had issues during the previous deploy that are jamming up future deploys.

Sorry for the late response to this, hopefully you are no longer having these issues with firebase (I hate firebase btw, always issues like this).