Firebase Microservices With Cloud Run

Yesterday Google Cloud released a game-changing new product called Cloud Run that allows you to run and scale stateless Docker containers in a serverless execution environment powered by Knative.

Benefits

• Run backend microservices with any programming language and/or dependencies.
• Serverless pricing, only pay for what you use.
• Scale automatically.
• Prevent cloud vendor lock-in.

Some of the things you might do with it…

• Deploy server-rendered SSR frontend apps to Firebase Hosting, like Angular Universal, Nuxt, or Next.
• Host WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, etc on Firebase Hosting.
• Create a RESTful or GraphQL API.
• Perform background tasks in any programming language.
• And really anything else you can imagine

What is a Stateless Container?

The server you deploy to Cloud Run must be stateless, which is a requirement for any code running in a serverless environment. This means you should not save anything other than temporary files on the filesystem and you cannot use a database in the container, ie PostgreSQL, MySQL, etc. All persistent data should be handed off to a different service like Cloud Storage or Firestore.

Step 0: Prerequisites

The following steps demonstrate how to deploy a serverside-rendered SSR JavaScript app (Nuxt/Vue) with Cloud Run.

1. Install Docker
2. Install Google Clould SDK
3. Have an existing Firebase/GCP Project

Step 1: Create a Serverside App (Nuxt)

Create a new Nuxt app and make sure to choose Universal rendering mode when prompted.

npx create-nuxt-app my-app

cd my-app
npm run dev

Step 2: Dockerize It

We need to containerize the app and tell it to serve on the PORT environment variable.

Create a Dockerfile

Create a Dockerfile in the root of the project.

# base node image
FROM node:10

WORKDIR /usr/src/app

ENV PORT 8080
ENV HOST 0.0.0.0

COPY package*.json ./

RUN npm install --only=production

# Copy local nuxt code to the container
COPY . .

# Build production app
RUN npm run build

# Start the service
CMD npm start

Build and Push

We can send the container directly to Google Cloud Build, but I generally prefer to run it locally first.

sudo docker build ./

It will take a few minutes to build the image, then give you an image_id that looks like 2cabacd123. Go ahead and run it locally to make sure it works properly.

sudo docker run -p 8080:8080 <your-image-id>

Next, upload the image to Google Cloud’s Container Registry.

sudo docker tag 7e6fdc4b97db gcr.io/fireship-lessons/nuxt-server
sudo docker push gcr.io/fireship-lessons/nuxt-server

Step 3: Create a Microservice on Cloud Run

Create your service on Cloud Run and make sure to tick YES to allow unauthenticated requests.

And that’s basically it, you now have a server-rendered JavaScript app microservice hosted in a serverless environment.

Step 4: Connect it to Firebase Hosting

As a final touch, let’s integrate our microserice with Firebase hosting.

Initialize Firebase Hosting

Initialize Firebase Hosting, select NO for “single page app”, then delete the public folder.

firebase init hosting
rm public

{
  "hosting": {
    "public": "public",
    "ignore": [
      "firebase.json",
      "**/.*",
      "**/node_modules/**"
    ],
    "rewrites": [ 
      {
        "source": "**",
        "run": {
          "serviceId": "nuxt-server",
          "region": "us-central1" 
        }
      }
    ]
  }
}

Deploy Hosting

Deploy your app to Firebase and you should now see Nuxt running with SSR on Firebase Hosting.

firebase deploy --only hosting