With my team, we use a lot of Firebase features like Firestore.

But there is no simple way to backup the data regularly.

We created a tiny Docker image zenika/alpine-firestore-backup and this simple tutorial to perform backups automatically on the Google Cloud Platform with Serverless services like Cloud Run and Cloud Scheduler.

Step1: Create a bucket on GCP

Create a GCP coldline bucket and save the name of your bucket.

Step2: Create a service account

Create a GCP Service account with the following rights:

• Owner
• Cloud Datastore Owner
• Cloud Datastore Import Export Admin
• Storage Admin

Then, download the JSON private key file.

Step3: Create your env variables for Cloud Run

Please fill in the following information:

• GCLOUD_PROJECT_ID
• GCLOUD_BUCKET_NAME
• GCLOUD_SERVICE_KEY

For the GCLOUD_SERVICE_KEY, make a base64 encoded string using this command:

cat key.json | base64

Step4: Set up Cloud Run

Cloud Run is a serverless service to automatically serve your containers using http.

Create a Cloud Run service using the public image gcr.io/zenika-hub/alpine-firestore-backup.

Be careful to:

• Choose your newly image in latest
• Choose "Cloud Run (fully managed)" and a location
• Enter a service name
• Select "Allow unauthenticated invocations"
• In the "Show optional settings / Environment variables", set the 3 environment variables seen in the previous section

You can test the service using your browser: https://alpine-firestore-backup-XXX-run.app/

Save the url created to call your Cloud Run Service.
For example: https://alpine-firestore-backup-XXX-run.app/backup

Step5: Launch with Cloud Scheduler

Cloud Scheduler allow you to schedule a cronjob in order to call a https endpoint at regular intervals.

Prepare a Cloud Scheduler to send a request to your Cloud Run Service every time you need.

For example, every Monday at 3:00am 0 3 * * 1 a backup will be done and stored in your bucket.

Step6: Monitor the backup operations

You can also check the current status of each backup operation using the following url https://alpine-firestore-backup-XXX-run.app/list

Conclusion

Feel free to have a look at the Docker image we created for this operation here on github or here on dockerhub.

We also have others images we maintained like a popular and small Chromium Headless image called zenika/alpine-chrome.