Running Firestore local e.g. for testing

Question

Is there a way to run firestore locally (e.g. for testing purposes)?

What would the approach to write tests against the DB (except of using mocks)

Answer 1

You can run the Firestore emulator by running:

gcloud beta emulators firestore start

and then set the FIRESTORE_EMULATOR_HOST environment variable as per the console output (e.g. run export FIRESTORE_EMULATOR_HOST=::1:8505).

This requires the Google Cloud SDK and a Java 8+ JRE installed and on your system PATH.