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I am working with Firebase and Google Cloud Platform, and I need clarification on the relationship between Firebase projects and Google Cloud projects. Specifically, I want to understand if it's possible to link multiple distinct Firebase projects to a single underlying Google Cloud project.

My understanding is that a Firebase project is essentially a Google Cloud project with additional Firebase-specific configurations and services enabled. This suggests a one-to-one relationship.

Based on this understanding, my questions are:

  1. Is it possible to have two or more distinct Firebase projects share the same underlying Google Cloud project?
  2. If not, what are the implications of this one-to-one relationship regarding shared identity, unified resources, and managing different environments (e.g., development, staging, production)?
  3. What is the recommended practice for managing multiple distinct applications or environments if a single Google Cloud project cannot host multiple Firebase projects?
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3 Replies 3

Oleg
•

  1. No. A single Google Cloud project can only be “upgraded to Firebase” once, meaning you cannot attach multiple Firebase projects to the same Cloud project.

  2. Because each Firebase project maps to exactly one Google Cloud project Each Firebase project has its own:

  • Authentication users
  • App tokens
  • API keys
  • App identifiers

Since each Firebase project equal to each Cloud project, none of these can be shared between Firebase projects.

  1. Recommened way is to create multiple apps for each environment for a single firebase project.
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Frank van Puffelen
•
  1. Recommened way is to create multiple apps for each environment for a single firebase project.

Most of the customers I've worked with use a separate Firebase/GCP project for each environment.

Can you point out where you get this from, or explain further why you'd recommend a single project across multiple environments?

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Frank van Puffelen
•

Pasting your third question into Google, gives this AI result - which matches with my own experience from working on Firebase for about a decade:

enter image description here

Since AI may make mistakes, here are some other sources that say the same:

  • Firebase Functions version of "Deploy to multiple environments" (Doug Stevenson was also a long-time Firebase team member at the time)
  • Firebase documentation on general best practices:

    If you have multiple build variants that are based on release status (rather than on common end-user activity or access, like above), register each variant with a separate Firebase project. An example is your debug vs release build – register each of these builds in its own Firebase project.

For having multiple apps in a project, the guidance is usually to have "one project per logo". This means that variants of the same app (the pro and free version, the admin app, the versions for different platforms) all go into one project, but completely separate apps go into different projects.

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