Prerequisites

Firebase

0. Create project on Firebase - reference
1. Install the Firebase CLI tool: npm i -g firebase-tools firebase cli doc (you might need to sudo)
2. Log in via the Firebase CLI tool: firebase login. You will be brought to your browser. Log in using the Google account which has been given access to the project.

OBTAIN THE SERVICE ACCOUNT KEY

• On Firebase, generate a service account if it has not been created.
• Place the key under ${PROJECT_ROOT}/functions/secrets/google-key.json, where PROJECT_ROOT is your local path to the OpenPromises API repo.

INSTALL THE GOOGLE CLOUD SDK

• Go to https://cloud.google.com/sdk/install
• Follow the instructions to install the Google Cloud SDK (install it in your home directory)
• Run the init command as mentioned in the install instructions: ./google-cloud-sdk/bin/gcloud init (it should have asked you to login and select the project)

If you ignore this step, the OP API will throw an error: Error: Could not load the default credentials. whenever you send a request to it.

Up and Running

API calls require a token and email in the header (perhaps we should phase out needing the email in header as the decoded token might contain the email. TODO: check if decoded token contains email.)

1. GET YOUR FIREBASE TOKEN

• Go to: https://www.openpromises.com/
• Log out if you are already logged in
• Open the Browser dev tools and go to the Network tab. You will need this because you will extract the token from the response headers after you sign in.
• Select "Sign in with Google" to sign in with your Google account
• In the Network tab, look for the GET request with the path of: ?email=YOUR_EMAIL. Usually it's the very last entry in the list.
• Click on the entry and inspect the headers. You need the header called x-firebase-token.
• Use the value for the x-firebase-token header in your requests to the OpenPromises API

2. RUN THE API SERVER

• Run cd functions/
• Run npm ci (do ci over i whenever possible to not modify the lockfile unintentionally)
• Run npm run tsc:watch and leave the terminal open
• In a new terminal (also in /functions), run npm run serve (if you run into Error: Port 5000 is not open on localhost, could not start functions emulator., find out what is already running on port 5000 and kill it) (on unix systems, run lsof -t -i tcp:5000 to see what is running on port 5000) (in MacOS Monterrey, port 5000 might be used by AirPlay receiver, switch it off reference image )
• When the npm run serve command is done, it will output the list of the OpenPromises API's endpoints.

3. DONE!

At this point you can send requests to the OpenPromises endpoints from the list. Please make sure to set the x-firebase-token and x-firebase-email headers for every request.