Escaping issue with firebase privateKey as a Heroku config variable

Question

I\'m trying to create an Heroku node task that reads data from Firebase and console.log it.

My node script (located inside the /bin directory) is:

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Answer 1

I had the same problem today. You need to sanitize the read private key by replacing \\n characters with \n.

admin.initializeApp({
  credential: admin.credential.cert({
    "projectId": process.env.FIREBASE_PROJECT_ID,
    "private_key": process.env.FIREBASE_PRIVATE_KEY.replace(/\\n/g, '\n'),
    "clientEmail": process.env.FIREBASE_CLIENT_EMAIL,
  }),
  databaseURL: process.env.FIREBASE_DATABASE_URL,
});

Answer 2

I solved this by using the .replace(/\n/g, '\n') on the private key and also removing the quotes from the private key value on heroku config vars like it is bellow.

-----BEGIN PRIVATE KEY-----\nMY-PRIVATE-KEY\n-----END PRIVATE KEY-----\n

Answer 3

In my case I solved it by converting FIREBASE_PRIVATE_KEY to a base64 string, then I saved this new string as an environment variable in Heroku. In my code, I converted the base64 FIREBASE_PRIVATE_KEY to the original private key again.

const firebase_private_key_b64 = Buffer.from(process.env.FIREBASE_PRIVATE_KEY_BASE64, 'base64');
const firebase_private_key = firebase_private_key_b64.toString('utf8');

admin.initializeApp({
    credential: admin.credential.cert({
        "project_id": process.env.FIREBASE_PROJECT_ID,
        "private_key": firebase_private_key,
        "client_email": process.env.FIREBASE_CLIENT_EMAIL,
    }),
    databaseURL: process.env.FIREBASE_DATABASE_URL
});