Firebase provides several key advantages for Angular applications:
- Lightning-fast data synchronization: Firebase can serve as your entire backend service, not only persisting your data, but synchronizing it instantly between millions of connected clients.
- No backend server: Utilizing only the Firebase JavaScript SDK and AngularFire, combined with our flexible Security Rules rules, you can have complete control of your data without any server-side hardware or code.
- Built-in authentication: Firebase provides an authentication and user management service which interfaces with OAuth service providers like Facebook and Twitter, as well as anonymous and email / password authentication tools. You can even integrate with an existing authentication service using Firebase custom authentication.
- Free hosting: Every Firebase app comes with free hosting served over a secure SSL connection and backed by a global CDN. You can deploy your static HTML, JavaScript, and CSS files to the web in seconds.
- Magical data bindings: Our AngularFire library works like glue between Angular's two-way bindings and Firebase's scalable synchronization platform.
AngularFire is an open source library maintained by the Firebase team and our amazing community of developers. It provides three-way communication between your Firebase database and Angular's DOM - JavaScript bindings.
If you are unfamiliar with Firebase, we suggest you start by reading through the Firebase web
guide. It is important to understand the
fundamental principles of how to structure data in your Firebase database and how to read and write
from it before diving into AngularFire. These bindings are meant to complement the core Firebase
client library, not replace it entirely by adding $ signs in front of the methods.
AngularFire is also not ideal for synchronizing deeply nested collections inside of collections. In general, deeply nested collections should typically be avoided in distributed systems.
While AngularFire abstracts a lot of complexities involved in synchronizing data, it is not required to use Angular with Firebase. Alternatives are covered in the Beyond AngularFire section of this guide.
Adding Firebase to your application is easy. Simply include the Firebase JavaScript SDK and the AngularFire bindings from our CDN:
<!-- Angular -->
<script src="https://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/angularjs/1.5.8/angular.min.js"></script>
<!-- Firebase -->
<script src="https://www.gstatic.com/firebasejs/3.6.0/firebase.js"></script>
<!-- AngularFire -->
<script src="https://cdn.firebase.com/libs/angularfire/2.0.1/angularfire.min.js"></script>Firebase and AngularFire are also available via npm and Bower as firebase and angularfire,
respectively. A Yeoman generator is also
available.
Once we have our libraries installed, we can include the AngularFire services by declaring
firebase as a module dependency in our application.
var app = angular.module("sampleApp", ["firebase"]);We now will have access to three services provided by AngularFire: $firebaseObject,
$firebaseArray, and $firebaseAuth. To use these services, we need to inject them into a
controller, factory, or service.
app.controller("SampleController", ["$scope", "$firebaseArray",
function($scope, $firebaseArray) {
// ...
}
]);Let's see it in action! The live code example below is a working demo of a rudimentary chat room. It binds an Angular view to a Firebase backend, synchronizing a list of messages between the DOM, Angular, and Firebase in realtime. It doesn't seem like much code for all of this, and that's part of the magic!
// define our app and dependencies (remember to include firebase!)
var app = angular.module("sampleApp", ["firebase"]);
// this factory returns a synchronized array of chat messages
app.factory("chatMessages", ["$firebaseArray",
function($firebaseArray) {
// create a reference to the database location where we will store our data
var ref = firebase.database().ref();
// this uses AngularFire to create the synchronized array
return $firebaseArray(ref);
}
]);
app.controller("ChatCtrl", ["$scope", "chatMessages",
// we pass our new chatMessages factory into the controller
function($scope, chatMessages) {
$scope.user = "Guest " + Math.round(Math.random() * 100);
// we add chatMessages array to the scope to be used in our ng-repeat
$scope.messages = chatMessages;
// a method to create new messages; called by ng-submit
$scope.addMessage = function() {
// calling $add on a synchronized array is like Array.push(),
// except that it saves the changes to our database!
$scope.messages.$add({
from: $scope.user,
content: $scope.message
});
// reset the message input
$scope.message = "";
};
// if the messages are empty, add something for fun!
$scope.messages.$loaded(function() {
if ($scope.messages.length === 0) {
$scope.messages.$add({
from: "Firebase Docs",
content: "Hello world!"
});
}
});
}
]);<div ng-app="sampleApp" ng-controller="ChatCtrl">
<ul class="chatbox">
<li ng-repeat="message in messages">{{ message.from }}: {{ message.content }}</li>
</ul>
<form ng-submit="addMessage()">
<input type="text" ng-model="message">
<input type="submit" value="Add Message">
</form>
</div>The primary purpose of AngularFire is to manage synchronized data, which is exposed through the
$firebaseObject and $firebaseArray services. These services are aware of how Angular's
compile process works, and notifies it at the correct
points to check $digest for changes and update the DOM. If that sounds like a foreign language,
that's okay! AngularFire is taking care of it, so don't worry.
It's not always necessary to set up AngularFire bindings to interact with the database. This is particularly true when just writing data, and not synchronizing it locally. Since you already have a database reference handy, it is perfectly acceptable to simply use the vanilla Firebase client library API methods.
var ref = firebase.database().ref();
// We don't always need AngularFire!
//var obj = $firebaseObject(ref);
// For example, if we just want to increment a counter, which we aren't displaying locally,
// we can just set it using the SDK
ref.child("foo/counter").transaction(function(currentValue) {
return (currentValue || 0) + 1;
});Data is synchronized with our database asynchronously. This means that calls to the remote server take some time to execute, but the code keeps running in the meantime. Thus, we have to be careful to wait for the server to return data before we can access it.
The easiest way to log the data is to print it within the view using Angular's json filter.
AngularFire tells the Angular compiler when it has finished loading the data, so there is no need to
worry about when it be available.
<pre>{{ data | json }}</pre>It's also possible to do this directly in the controller by using the
$loaded() method.
However, this method should be used with care as it's only called once after initial load. Using it
for anything but debugging is usually a poor practice.
var ref = firebase.database().ref();
$scope.data = $firebaseObject(ref);
// this waits for the data to load and then logs the output. Therefore,
// data from the server will now appear in the logged output. Use this with care!
$scope.data.$loaded()
.then(function() {
console.log($scope.data);
})
.catch(function(err) {
console.error(err);
});When working directly with the SDK, it's important to notify Angular's compiler after the data has been loaded:
var ref = firebase.database().ref();
ref.on("value", function(snapshot) {
// This isn't going to show up in the DOM immediately, because
// Angular does not know we have changed this in memory.
// $scope.data = snapshot.val();
// To fix this, we can use $scope.$apply() to notify Angular that a change occurred.
$scope.$apply(function() {
$scope.data = snapshot.val();
});
});Now that we understand the basics of integrating AngularFire into our application, let's dive deeper
into reading and writing synchronized data with our database. The
next section introduces the $firebaseObject service for creating
synchronized objects.