FR: Async requests

I am using firebase-admin on an asyncio project and when there are a lot of requests it slows down the whole API.

Surprisingly, I didn't see any other issues about this, I hope I am not duplicating.

ref = yield from db.reference
result = yield from ref.get()

Thanks

Can this be not handled in the application code? Basically execute Admin SDK methods like ref.get() on separate threads.

It won't scale as I would like and, to my opinion, complicates the code and is harder to track.

Most of our users are on Python 2.7, so we cannot directly expose async coroutines from the SDK anytime soon. In the meantime you should be able to get around the scalability issues by using the run_in_executor() method of the asyncio event loop.

ref = db.reference(path) # Doesn't make RPC calls

executor = concurrent.futures.ThreadPoolExecutor(max_workers=8)
loop = asyncio.get_event_loop()
loop.run_in_executor(executor, ref.get) # Make RPC call on a separate thread

In case anyone runs into the same problem -
Eventually, I am using the REST API.
Calling it asynchronously with aiohttp.

For auth I am using the database secret which is DEPRECATED, so it's not ideal, but it works for now.

@eranhirs

@eranhirs would you feel like starting a async-firebase project that we could contribute to?

I wanted to report that having async support for an auth SDK is very important. This is exactly the area where async frameworks make a huge difference, where you do a client side request inside a server side request.

Please consider adding core support and examples for using with ASGI frameworks, like Starlette:
https://github.com/encode/starlette

I agree with the general feeling here. Not having async support is making this library a tad less useful nowadays. Not very future proof unfortunately.

+1 on this. My project has a few hundred thousand items that need to be worked via Firebase, and ~1 second latency times make wait times intractable without async support

Python 2.7 is no longer supported. Any progress here?

This needs to be first addressed in other GCP Python libraries that we use as dependencies. More specifically, the google-auth library (which we use to make all authorized HTTP calls) needs to support it. From what I can see, they have plans to add async support starting from 2020, but there is no concrete timetable as of now:

googleapis/google-auth-library-python#321
googleapis/google-cloud-python#3103

I can only imagine that this will take a while considering the engineering effort that is involved. Pretty much all existing APIs have to be re-evaluated and redesigned for async support.

If google-auth takes a very long time to introduce async support, we can consider wrapping the existing google-auth APIs in async threads, so that at least firebase-admin can expose an async API to the developer. But even that is going to require a lot of work, based on some prototyping results I've managed to put together.

[DataStore] closes #7

Is there any development on this front?
Also can you please reopen this issue?
We have been using firestore and lack of async is a very big downside of firestore.
If async supported is not planned for google services, It would be nice if we know beforehand so we can plan our migration to services that support it. Lack of this feature is causing us both money and product quality tbh.

There's been no development in this space afaik. We cannot support an async API until the core GCP Python libraries like google-auth provide async support. For Firestore you can file a feature request directly at https://github.com/googleapis/python-firestore

It seems there is an open PR related to adding async support.

One of the contributors to the libraries just left a comment.

Would be great to hear about firebase-admin maintainers/contributors perspective on this. :)

Edit: I will look into the repo you linked and file a feature request maybe, thanks for the reply :)

Good news! We are prioritizing this task and have plans to start the initial planning work over the coming months. It is still too early to provide a timeline, but I will reopen this issue so we can track the progress here. Thank you everyone for your patience!

Hi! Is there any update about this feature ? I saw a pull request to use new version of the google-auth api, would that fulfill prerequisites ?

Hello! I know the last comment wasn't left here long ago, but as it didn't get any answer, I'm posting another one.
Has a timeline been agreed upon since April 2021, and if there is one, could you please let everyone know here?

Many thanks!

Thank you again for your patience on this!
This is a high priority task for us and we should start seeing the initial changes sometime in Q2/Q3 2022. I can't promise you a timeline for this feature but rest assured that this is something on our immediate roadmap for this year and you will see updates in the coming months.

Hey Folks, We just released v5.3.0 which added async support for the Cloud Firestore API. This is the first step into fulfilling this FR so please give it a try and let us know what you think!

Seems to be working well, we haven't used this under heavy load yet, though.

I'm curious to hear how others are experiencing this, but AFAIK it's good and robust.

We mostly use firestore and do async gcloud storage uploads too, so things are pretty good.

Messages seems to be one thing missing? #639
That would be actually nice to have.

Hi, are there any plans to add async support to the admin auth client? Thanks for the great work!

@lahirumaramba

Hi @lahirumaramba ! Just checking in - are there any updates or an ETA on this feature? Are there any blockers currently preventing progress?
It’s been quite a while - over 8 years since the issue was created and 2.5 years since the last update - so any news or context would be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance!

Is there any plan to add async support? Or is this a won't fix?

If you want async support, you should rely on google-cloud-firestore:

from google.cloud.firestore_v1.async_client import AsyncClient

db = AsyncClient()

async def add_doc_async():
    doc_ref = db.collection("users").document()
    await doc_ref.set({"name": "Alice"})

@Natim

@Natim Thank you. But does that work for auth too?

I haven't tried but, if it doesn't, alternatively you can use an async wrapper such as:

import asyncio
import firebase_admin
from firebase_admin import credentials, auth

cred = credentials.Certificate("service-account.json")
firebase_admin.initialize_app(cred)

# --- Blocking functions ------------------------------

def verify_id_token_blocking(token: str):
    return auth.verify_id_token(token)

def create_user_blocking(**kwargs):
    return auth.create_user(**kwargs)

def get_user_blocking(uid: str):
    return auth.get_user(uid)

def set_custom_claims_blocking(uid: str, claims: dict):
    return auth.set_custom_user_claims(uid, claims)

# --- Async wrappers -----------------------------------

async def verify_id_token_async(token: str):
    return await asyncio.to_thread(verify_id_token_blocking, token)

async def create_user_async(**kwargs):
    return await asyncio.to_thread(create_user_blocking, **kwargs)

async def get_user_async(uid: str):
    return await asyncio.to_thread(get_user_blocking, uid)

async def set_custom_claims_async(uid: str, claims: dict):
    return await asyncio.to_thread(set_custom_claims_blocking, uid, claims)


# --- Example usage inside async context ---------------

async def main():
    user = await create_user_async(email="test@x.com", password="pw1234")
    print("User created:", user.uid)

    decoded = await verify_id_token_async("<token>")
    print("Token claims:", decoded)

    user2 = await get_user_async(user.uid)
    print("Fetched user:", user2.email)

asyncio.run(main())

Apparently you can yes

import asyncio
import firebase_admin
from firebase_admin import credentials, auth
from google.cloud.firestore_v1.async_client import AsyncClient

cred = credentials.Certificate("service-account.json")
firebase_admin.initialize_app(cred)

db = AsyncClient()

async def get_user_data_from_token(id_token: str):
    decoded = auth.verify_id_token(token)
    uid = decoded["uid"]
    doc = await db.collection("users").document(uid).get()
    return doc.to_dict() if doc.exists else None

Firebase Admin Python SDK supports Firestore Async clients. See https://firebase.google.com/docs/firestore/quickstart#python_2

The SDK also supports async counterparts for Messaging (send_each_async() and send_each_for_multicast_async()).

We will continue to extend support for other services in the future. If you have requests for async support in a specific Firebase service please create a new FR covering that service. It helps us track progress instead of having a global FR for all the services/APIs.

Navigation Menu

Repository navigation

FR: Async requests #104

5 remaining items

Metadata

Assignees

Labels

Type

Projects

Milestone

Relationships

Development

FR: Async requests #104

Description

Activity

hiranya911 commented on Dec 11, 2017

eranhirs commented on Dec 12, 2017

hiranya911 commented on Dec 12, 2017

eranhirs commented on Dec 13, 2017

Natim commented on Mar 5, 2019

hyperknot commented on Apr 17, 2019

Lawouach commented on Jul 26, 2019

labroid commented on Jan 1, 2020

labroid commented on Jan 1, 2020

hiranya911 commented on Jan 1, 2020

kamyar commented on Jun 3, 2020

hiranya911 commented on Jun 3, 2020

kamyar commented on Jun 3, 2020

5 remaining items

lahirumaramba commented on Apr 9, 2021

miksa commented on Dec 20, 2021

guneemwelloeux commented on Feb 24, 2022

lahirumaramba commented on Feb 24, 2022

jkyle109 commented on Aug 25, 2022

antont commented on Feb 2, 2024

alexandermalyga commented on Dec 22, 2024

alex-paru commented on May 24, 2025

hojjatabdollahi commented on Dec 4, 2025

Natim commented on Dec 5, 2025

hojjatabdollahi commented on Dec 5, 2025

Natim commented on Dec 5, 2025

Natim commented on Dec 5, 2025

lahirumaramba commented on Dec 9, 2025

Metadata

Metadata

Assignees

Labels

Type

Projects

Milestone

Relationships

Development

Issue actions