Migrate Rails Devise Users to Firebase Authentication

My goal for my SaaS gixtra.com (a tool to book and organize concerts) is to delegate as many non-core-business features to external services, so I can focus on the important music business stuff. One milestone to reach this goal is to get rid of doing authentication myself in Devise. Since I find Google’s Firebase offering very appealing, I want to migrate my existing users to Firebase Authentication. Here is how I did it…

Getting started

This is basic Firebase setup stuff, so I will spare you the details.

First I created a new project in Firebase and enabled email authentication. Then I initialized my Rails app, connected it to the newly created Firebase project and chose to use just the Firebase database service.

Now comes the interesting part…

Importing in 2 steps

Importing your Devise users into Firebase Auth essentially takes 2 steps:

1. Export your user data into an appropriately formatted JSON file
2. Import that file via the Firebase CLI

1. Exporting Devise users to JSON

First we need to export our users into a JSON file, which will later be picked up by Firebase in the second…