Adding Firebase

So far, this is what we have. It's just the starter app, but it's updating via Redux. Which is cool.

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Now, we're going to add Firebase Firestore, as well as the ability to sign in users.

Firebase makes this incredibly easy.

Firebase is collection of tools that app developers can use to solve 'boilerplate' problems. The biggest of which are user authentication and a realtime database.

Every app pretty much needs these two things. Rather than hand-rolling a solution to these problems on every project you make, why not just defer to the experts?

I encourage you to poke around the Firebase homepage if you aren't convinced, and return to this when you're ready to set it up.

Integrating Firebase

Adding Firebase functionality to your application is one of the few times that you'll actually have to explore outside your Flutter app's lib folder, and add some low level configurations.

There is no way that I could write a better walk-through to setting up Firebase than the people at Google themselves could, so I'm going to send you to this Codelab about adding Firebase to your app

For the purpose of this tutorial, you should do Step 5 and half of Step 6. Stop when you get the heading 'Add Google Sign-In to Friendlychat'.