3. Fire-what!? 🔥

For this app, we'll use Firebase as our backend. If you don't know what Firebase is, it's an entire platform provided by Google that can handle almost every aspect of your app's infrastructure.

• For example, they provide a database, file storage, push notifications, hosting, among other things.

• For this workshop, we'll use Firestore, their new NoSQL database that has built-in real-time and offline features.

• This gives us two things out of the box, the content you change in the database gets updated real-time in every app that's connected, and it has offline sync without you doing extra work.

You can learn more about Firebase at firebase.google.com and use it for future projects.

Since we want to focus on building the actual app on this workshop we have already created a Firebase app for you to connect to, and we'll share the credentials with you later on this step

Installing Firebase 🔥

The first thing we need to do to start using Firebase is to install it in our project since Stackblitz handles that part for us.

Go to the "DEPENDENCIES" section on your left panel and in the input box that says Enter package name, and type firebase, then hit enter.

The package name needs to be written in lowercase, if you use uppercase it will show you an error saying it can't find it

Install Firebase

That gives you access to the entire Firebase SDK for web development. Now, we can take things one step further and install @angular/fire and @firebase/util.

• @angular/fire is a library created by people from both the Firebase and the Angular teams, and it gives you better integration with Firebase when you're working on Angular projects.

• @firebase/util is a utility library from Firebase that is needed starting from version 5.8.0.

You can install it by typing @angular/fire in the input box that says Enter package name the same way you installed Firebase, then do the same for @firebase/util.

Once both are installed you can go into package.json and see the package names there, if you don't, feel free to ask one of the mentors for help 🖐

Connect your app with Firebase 🔌

Now that Firebase is installed we need to let our Angular app know how it will communicate with it. For that, we'll go to the app.module.ts file and initialize Firebase.

It generally looks like this: 👇

app.module.ts

@NgModule({

  imports: [BrowserModule, ReactiveFormsModule],
  declarations: [AppComponent],
  bootstrap: [AppComponent],
})

It's a 2-step process. First, we need to import the packages we're going to use, so go ahead and add this to your imports: 👇

app.module.ts

import { AngularFireModule } from '@angular/fire';
import { AngularFirestoreModule } from '@angular/fire/firestore';

@angular/fire is modular, which means we only import what we'll use, in this case, we need the base functionality and Firestore.

And second, we'll add both AngularFireModule and AngularFirestoreModule to our imports array: 👇

@NgModule({
  imports: [
    BrowserModule,
    AngularFireModule.initializeApp({
      apiKey: 'AIzaSyBIM6XVuaqeBDtyyB9Ef1U5oUv9Cue9BK8',
      authDomain: 'first-firebase-angular.firebaseapp.com',
      databaseURL: 'https://first-firebase-angular.firebaseio.com',
      projectId: 'first-firebase-angular',
      storageBucket: 'first-firebase-angular.appspot.com',
      messagingSenderId: '306103315077',
    }),
    AngularFirestoreModule,
  ],
  declarations: [AppComponent],
  bootstrap: [AppComponent]
})

We're adding AngularFireModule and calling the .initializeApp() method to connect our app to Firebase. The .initializeApp() method takes an object as a parameter, that object is our credential object, which lets Angular know which Firebase app it needs to connect to.

• You'll copy those same credentials, the idea is we all share the same app and work faster that way.

• We're also adding the AngularFirestoreModule to let Angular know we'll be using the Firestore database in our project.

In the end, the entire file should look like this:

app.module.ts

import { NgModule } from '@angular/core';
import { BrowserModule } from '@angular/platform-browser';
import { AppComponent } from './app.component';
import { AngularFireModule } from '@angular/fire';
import { AngularFirestoreModule } from '@angular/fire/firestore';

@NgModule({
  imports: [
    BrowserModule,
    AngularFireModule.initializeApp({
      apiKey: 'AIzaSyBIM6XVuaqeBDtyyB9Ef1U5oUv9Cue9BK8',
      authDomain: 'first-firebase-angular.firebaseapp.com',
      databaseURL: 'https://first-firebase-angular.firebaseio.com',
      projectId: 'first-firebase-angular',
      storageBucket: 'first-firebase-angular.appspot.com',
      messagingSenderId: '306103315077',
    }),
    AngularFirestoreModule,
  ],
  declarations: [AppComponent],
  bootstrap: [AppComponent],
  providers: [],
})
export class AppModule {}

Next Steps 🔍

Once you're ready, move to the next step where we'll start building the C part of CRUD, we'll add the functionality to create a TV show and save it to the database!