I’m working on a project using React and Firebase. I’m working with Firebase emulator and I want to get the getDownloadURL out of a an image thats uploaded to Firebase storage so that i can add it to a corresponding image document. I tried using this code which is inside an onFinalize cloud function:

const newFile = admin
          .storage()
          .bucket(object.bucket)
          .file(object.name);
        const config = { action: "read", expires: "01-01-2035" };
        const downloadURLs = await newFile.getSignedUrl(config);
        const downloadURL = downloadURLs[0];

const images = firestore.collection("images");

return images.add({
          imageURL: imageLink,
          downloadURL: downloadURL,
        });

I get the error:

Cannot sign data without client_email.

I learnt that this means i need a service account and then i created one, placed the file in my functions folder and ran the following code:

export GOOGLE_APPLICATION_CREDENTIALS="functions/serviceAccount.json"           
firebase emulators:start --project=demo-project

and i got the following error:

⚠  functions: Failed to initialize and load triggers. This shouldn't happen: Failed to read credentials from file functions/serviceAccount.json: Error: ENOENT: no such file or directory, open 'functions/serviceAccount.json'

I then went on to use the service account thats specified in my Firebase settings page, placed it in my environment variables and ran the functions like so…

initializeApp({
        serviceAccountId: "demo-serviceAccount",
        apiKey: "demo-key",
        authDomain: "demo-domain",
        projectId: "demo-project",
        storageBucket: "demo-project.appspot.com",
        appId: "demo-appId",
        messagingSenderId: "demo-id",
        measurementId: "demo-measurementId",
      })

And this didn’t work:

Request to function failed: Error: socket hang up
This apparently is a Mac issue but when i applied the fix, nothing changed.

I’ve seen some comments mention that .json service accounts are not safe. What is best for an emulator?

Any help would be appreciated.