As much as I love Firebase, especially it’s easy to implement authentication, for some things Firebase can be a bit confusing when you go to implement them.

For Firebase Authentication, sadly, you cannot store any additional information and easily query it for authenticated users. You can leverage custom claims to add little pieces of meta to a user (like roles), but for things such as profile data, you can’t.

Fortunately, there is a solution you can easily implement using Firebase Functions and triggers.

The Workflow

A user signups for your application using Firebase Authentication. At the same time, you want to also create a new document inside of Firestore for that user and store some of their user information like uid as well as any custom claims, display name and so on.

This will then allow you to query Firestore for any additional data for this user. It might be fields like; date of birth, country, first and last name, their likes, a bio, anything.

Firebase Triggers

Inside of Firebase Functions, you can add a trigger for onCreate which will get called when a user creates an account in your application. This will be called when the user logs in using social oAuth (Google, GitHub, etc) as well as email/password and other login methods.

#firebase #authentication #firestore