Tangible Bytes

Website developers (like myself) often end up with a few websites we support - whether these are promoting a business, running a blog, for a side project, or a site for a friend or hobby.

Since these are often low to no budget and can’t be prioritised for work at busy times they need to be

• cheap
• low maintenance
• easy to set up
• blazingly fast

I have found Static Site Generators (I like Hugo) to be excellent for these sites as they are fast to update when I want to, highly configurable, and yet require zero maintenance when not being updated.

Static sites combined with Firebase hosting (and it’s use of CDNs) make for a very fast website.

Google’s Firebase doesn’t have a high profile but I found it to be a near perfect platform for this type of site.

What’s so Good About it?

While it is a paid platform - fees only kick in once you reach a threshold

Hosting is free up to 360Mb per day

You can use a custom domain if you have one at no extra charge - you even get an ssl certificate.

As well as static hosting you can run cloud functions and use their Firestore database.

Limitations

This isn’t a virtual server, you can’t run WordPress or Drupal here

It’s not all point and click - you do need some command line tools to run it.

Advantages Over AWS

Amazon Web Services are hugely popular and I think many developers (myself included) are tempted to just use AWS because that’s what “everyone” does and it seems like experience there would be useful.

I did try to setup a similar service there using S3, Cloudfront, and Lambdas

But that’s the thing - I had to use several services and glue them together. I needed Lambdas just to set headers

Even adding directory indexing was difficult and I ended up using ugly urls instead.

With Firebase everything pretty much worked out of the box - and things I wanted to fine tune were easy to setup with the config file firebase.json

How to Set it up

I’m going to assume you have a static site already - or you can just create a hello world index page to test with.

Assuming you have a google account

Sign into the firebase console

Really just click on create a project and follow the instructions there.

It’s so easy it isn’t worth writing up - except I’ll do it anyway because otherwise you’ll imagine it is more complex than it is.

• Create a Project

• Give it a name

  It has to be a name unique among all global Firebase instances (not just among yours) If you use a name someone else has used Google will append a random string to it
  The name will be used as the project name in your Firebase dashboard and also as default hostname using the domains web.app and firebaseapp.com
  e.g. some-unique-name.web.app

  You can add a custom domain later

• Choose whether to enable Google Analytics
  I have never used in on a project because I prefer not to have a cookie banner but it’s there if you want it.

• Wait a few moments till the project is ready

• Follow the steps (Google will walk you through this)

  navigate to or create a root directory for your web app

  npm install -g firebase-tools
  firebase login
  firebase init
  firebase deploy
  

That’s it - your site will be live.

Whatever html/css/js/images etc you had in the directory you defined as your web root will now be on a live server

To edit this site change the contents of your folder and run firebase deploy again.

The nice things about this are that

Updates are atomic : the files are synced and then Firebase flips over to the new site when ready.

Rollback is trivial : a release history is retained and you can roll back to any earlier release at the click of a button (how many old releases you store is configurable)

Going Further

I’ve found Firebase to be well documented and new features are being actively developed.

As well as using Firebase for static hosting I have used it with its Cloud Functions and Firestore database - those are great too -but there is more to learn.

The really amazing thing about Firebase hosting is just how easy it is.

and for sites like this I haven’t paid a penny.

Google seem to have marketed Firebase as a mobile app solution - and it looks great for that - but it also works perfectly for a Static site with Cloud Functions and a NoSQL database and minimal setup.