Firebase Token Generator - Python

Firebase Custom Login gives you complete control over user authentication by allowing you to authenticate users with secure JSON Web Tokens (JWTs). The auth payload stored in those tokens is available for use in your Firebase security rules. This is a token generator library for Python which allows you to easily create those JWTs.

Installation

The Firebase Python token generator library is available via pip:

$ pip install firebase-token-generator

A Note About Security

IMPORTANT: Because token generation requires your Firebase Secret, you should only generate tokens on trusted servers. Never embed your Firebase Secret directly into your application and never share your Firebase Secret with a connected client.

Generating Tokens

To generate tokens, you'll need your Firebase Secret which you can find by entering your Firebase URL into a browser and clicking the "Secrets" tab on the left-hand navigation menu.

Once you've downloaded the library and grabbed your Firebase Secret, you can generate a token with this snippet of Python code:

from firebase_token_generator import create_token

auth_payload = {"uid": "1", "auth_data": "foo", "other_auth_data": "bar"}
token = create_token("<YOUR_FIREBASE_SECRET>", auth_payload)

The payload passed to create_token() is made available for use within your security rules via the auth variable. This is how you pass trusted authentication details (e.g. the client's user ID) to your Firebase security rules. The payload can contain any data of your choosing, however it must contain a "uid" key, which must be a string of less than 256 characters. The generated token must be less than 1024 characters in total.

Token Options

A second options argument can be passed to create_token() to modify how Firebase treats the token. Available options are:

• expires (int or datetime) - A timestamp (as number of seconds since the epoch) or datetime denoting the time after which this token should no longer be valid.

• notBefore (int or datetime) - A timestamp (as number of seconds since the epoch) or datetime denoting the time before which this token should be rejected by the server.

• admin (bool) - Set to True if you want to disable all security rules for this client. This will provide the client with read and write access to your entire Firebase.

• debug (bool) - Set to True to enable debug output from your security rules. You should generally not leave this set to True in production (as it slows down the rules implementation and gives your users visibility into your rules), but it can be helpful for debugging.

• simulate (bool) - If True, Firebase will run security rules but not actually make any data changes. Note that this is internal-only for now.

Here is an example of how to use the second options argument:

from firebase_token_generator import create_token

auth_payload = {"uid": "1", "auth_data": "foo", "other_auth_data": "bar"}
options = {"admin": True}
token = create_token("<YOUR_FIREBASE_SECRET>", auth_payload, options)