When Your Firebase Cloud Functions Don’t Want to Deploy Anymore

TL;DR — I fixed the issue by setting my local and Cloud Functions Node.js version to 12.

The Story

I have always used firebase-tools to manually deploy my Cloud Functions like this:

firebase deploy --only functions

For the last eight months that my project/company has lived, I have never experienced an issue deploying my Cloud Functions, until today.

This time, I got an error:

Deployment error. Build failed: Build error details not available.

Why were the build error details not available? I’ll never know. This error was about as useless as they come. I knew what I had to do. After pasting this message into Google, I stumbled upon the following GitHub issue:

https://github.com/firebase/firebase-tools/issues/853

After reading every last message in the forum, waiting with growing anticipation to find the solution, I found nothing.

I had to go deeper. I’m talking behind the scenes, rip off the Firebase curtain, into the Google Cloud Platform logs. I found this:

ERROR: error fetching storage source: generic::unknown: retry budget exhausted (3 attempts): fetching gcs source: unpacking source from gcs: source fetch container exited with non-zero status: 1

Obviously, this meant nothing to me, but I had something to work with. I pasted this message into Google and found the answer:

GCP Cloud Function - ERROR fetching storage source during build/deploy

Guided by this StackOverflow question, I fixed the issue by setting my local and Cloud Functions Node.js version to 12. Why did this fix the issue? Well, as all good software engineers know, don’t think about it too much. Thanks for taking some time to read this. Maybe it helped you. Maybe you’ll give me some claps. Maybe I wrote this for myself, so I never have to deal with this again.

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