Chat with Firebase for production and Django user authentication

[Guy Tamir]

Hey all,

I'm really new to Firebase and trying to decide if I should use FIrebase on my app.

I'm developing an online marketplace (2 types of users)

I want to add a messaging system between the 2 types of users.

(Working with Django for backend and AngularJS on frontend)

I have 2 questions.

1. Should Firebase really be used for chat\messaging infrastructure?

2. My users login into the app using the Django authentication framework. Once the users logged in I want them to be able to chat without any further login needed.

Is it possible to authenticate my django user with the Firebase authentication system so that each user can see only the messages relevant to him an so on.

Best,

[Chris Raynor]

Hey,

Thanks for considering Firebase. Let me answer your questions in turn:

1) Yes! Firebase grew out of a company that built a plug-in chat module for websites, and one very popular use for Firebase is to add chat functionality to existing apps. We have a number of open-source examples, including Firechat and this simpler example, and there are even companies offering chat products on top of Firebase - like chatcat.io (which is still in beta).

2) Using our custom token generator for python it's easy to generate authentication tokens for Firebase on your trusted server using the trusted secret from your data dashboard. Here's a link to the documentation - just ensure you have a "uid" in the data field, and pass the token to the client, then your client will be able to auth to Firebase no problem

Hope that helps!

Chris

Engineer @ Firebase

[Guy Tamir]

Thanks for the answer