setCredentials is required but not mentioned in documentation when using setServiceAccountId

• Library version: 6.6.0
• Firebase Product: firebase-admin

Following the documentation under “Using a service account ID” I should be able to skip the setCredentials option in the builder, as based on the documentation it’s assumed to replace the need for a local copy of service-account.json. However should the setCredentials be missed, a NullPointerException is thrown

Caused by: java.lang.NullPointerException: FirebaseOptions must be initialized with setCredentials().

Attempt to set FirebaseOptions without a setCredentials option.

public FirebaseAuth firebaseAuth() throws IOException {
    FirebaseOptions options = new FirebaseOptions.Builder()
            .setServiceAccountId(SERVICE_ACCOUNT_EMAIL)
            .setProjectId(PROJECT_ID)
            .setDatabaseUrl(String.format("https://%s.firebaseio.com/", DATABASE_NAME))
            .build();

    FirebaseApp.initializeApp(options);

    return FirebaseAuth.getInstance();
}

Is the documentation incorrect/lacking detail or is this a bug?

[hiranya911]

SDK always requires some credentials to authorize remote API calls. Service account ID is only used when signing JWTs using the Cloud IAM API (those API calls also need to be authorized with some credentials).

[ravindranathakila]

Thank you very much for clarifying. It gives a lot of confidence to know it won’t mess with all the users hooked up with Firebase (as in, doesn’t play a role in user session management). It would be unfortunate to later discover there were two keys linked to a token and one is gone thereby breaking all token validity.

On Sun, Feb 9, 2020, 9:04 AM Hiranya Jayathilaka [e-mail] wrote:

SDK always requires some credentials to authorize remote API calls. Service account ID is only used when signing JWTs using the Cloud IAM API (those API calls also need to be authorized with some credentials).

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