Installation & Setup for REST API

The Firebase Realtime Database is a cloud-hosted database. Data is stored as JSON and synchronized in realtime to every connected client. When you build cross-platform apps with our Android, iOS, and JavaScript SDKs, all of your clients share one Realtime Database instance and automatically receive updates with the newest data.

We can use any Firebase Realtime Database URL as a REST endpoint. All we need to do is append .json to the end of the URL and send a request from our favorite HTTPS client.

Create an account

First sign up for a free account in the Firebase console. A new Firebase app will be created for you with a unique URL ending in firebaseio.com. You'll use this URL to authenticate your users and to store and sync data to the app's database.

Within the Firebase console you can create, manage and delete Firebase apps. Clicking on a specific Firebase app lets you view and modify your app's database in realtime. In your app dashboard, you can also set Firebase Realtime Database Rules, manage your app's authentication, deploys, and view analytics.

Choose a Helper Library

You can read and write data through the REST API directly from the command line. In this guide we'll use cURL for all of our examples. We also have several third-party helper libraries for interacting with the REST API from your favorite language. You can use one of the following helper libraries or create your own:

Language Libraries
Clojure taika by Cloudfuji
Dart IO Client in the official firebase-dart library
Go Firego by Steven Berlanga and Tim Gossett
Go Firebase by Cosmin Nicolaescu and Justin Tulloss
Java firebase4j by Brandon Gresham
Perl Firebase-Perl by Kiran Kumar and JT Smith
PHP firebase-php by kreait
firebase-php by Tamas Kalman
Python Pyrebase by James Childs-Maidment
python-firebase by Özgür Vatansever
python-firebase by Michael Huynh
Ruby firebase-ruby by Oscar Del Ben
BigBertha by Fernand Galiana
rest-firebase by Codementor

Next Steps