Exporting data from Cloud Firestore to local emulator

Steps to export data from Cloud Firestore to local emulator.

1. Login to Firebase or Google Cloud:

firebase login

or

gcloud auth login    

2. Connect to your project:

firebase use your-project-name

or

gcloud config set project your-project-name

3. Export your production data to the Google Cloud storage bucket folder:

gcloud firestore export gs://your-project-name.appspot.com/<your-choosen-folder-name>

4. Copy bucket folder to your local machine:

gsutil -m cp -r gs://your-project-name.appspot.com/<your-choosen-folder-name> /path/to/some/folder

Now we have production data in our local machine, but we need to make some modifications in order to make it available to emulators. Just follow these three simple steps.

First, switch to the newly created folder:

cd /path/to/some/folder

Rename the metadata file as firestore_export.overall_export_metadata:

mv your-choosen-folder-name.overall_export_metadata firestore_export.overall_export_metadata

And finally, copy all files to .emulator-data/firestore_export in your workspace folder:

cp -R * /path/to/workspace/emulator/.emulator-data/firestore_export/

That's it! The next time you run emulators, Firestore will have all the imported data.