Firebase Setup

Code Insights needs two things from Firebase:

1. Service account key — Used by the CLI to write session data to Firestore.
2. Web SDK config — Used by the dashboard to read data from your Firestore.

This guide walks through creating both.

Create a Firebase Project

1. Go to console.firebase.google.com
2. Click “Create a project” (or “Add project”)
3. Enter a project name (e.g., code-insights-yourname)
4. Disable Google Analytics when prompted (not needed)
5. Click “Create project” and wait for it to finish

Enable Firestore

1. In your new project, click “Build” in the left sidebar
2. Click “Firestore Database”
3. Click “Create database”
4. Choose “Start in production mode”
5. Select the region closest to you (this cannot be changed later)
6. Click “Enable”

Download the Service Account Key

1. Click the gear icon next to “Project Overview” in the sidebar
2. Select “Project settings”
3. Go to the “Service accounts” tab
4. Click “Generate new private key” then “Generate key”
5. A JSON file will download — save it somewhere accessible (e.g., ~/Downloads/serviceAccountKey.json)

The CLI will read three values from this file during setup: project_id, client_email, and private_key.

Register a Web App

1. Still in Project settings, go to the “General” tab
2. Scroll down to “Your apps”
3. Click the Web icon (</>) to add a web app
4. Enter a nickname (e.g., code-insights-web), click “Register app”
5. Firebase will show a code snippet — copy the entire snippet and save it to a file (e.g., ~/Downloads/firebase-web-config.js):

// You can paste the entire Firebase snippet as-is
const firebaseConfig = {
  apiKey: "AIza...",
  authDomain: "your-project.firebaseapp.com",
  projectId: "your-project",
  storageBucket: "your-project.appspot.com",
  messagingSenderId: "123456789",
  appId: "1:123456789:web:abc123"
};

The CLI automatically extracts the config from the JavaScript — no manual conversion to JSON needed.

Update Firestore Security Rules

The default production rules block all reads, which prevents the dashboard from loading your data. Update them:

1. In Firebase Console, go to Firestore Database then Rules
2. Replace the default rules with:

rules_version = '2';
service cloud.firestore {
  match /databases/{database}/documents {
    match /{document=**} {
      allow read, write: if true;
    }
  }
}

3. Click “Publish”

Caution

These rules allow open access, which is fine for personal use since your project ID isn’t public. For shared or team use, see the Firebase Security Rules documentation to set up proper authentication-based rules.

Next Steps

You now have both JSON files needed to configure the CLI. Head to Quick Start to run code-insights init and start syncing.