Jest and Firestore: could not reach Cloud Firestore backend
May 8, 2024
May 8, 2024
So you’re using Jest to do some unit tests that involve testing
Firebase-related stuff like Firestore, maybe Firestore rules with
@firebase/rules-unit-testing?
But your test just times out:
thrown: "Exceeded timeout of 5000 ms for a test.
Add a timeout value to this test to increase the timeout, if this is a long-running test. See https://jestjs.io/docs/api#testname-fn-timeout."
So you go on and add a longer timeout value to the test, but then you hit another level of timeout:
@firebase/firestore: Firestore: Could not reach Cloud Firestore backend. Backend didn't respond within 10 seconds.
This typically indicates that your device does not have a healthy Internet connection at the moment. The client will operate in offline mode until it is able to successfully connect to the backend.
By any chance, are you using jest-environment-jsdom?
Something like this in your jest.config.js:
module.exports = {
testEnvironment: 'jsdom'
// testEnvironment: 'jest-environment-jsdom'
}
If so, look no further. Firestore doesn’t like what
jest-environment-jsdom does to the global object and makes it hang
forever.
It took me long enough to figure that out, so I didn’t manage to
figure out why exactly it’s the case. So far my understanding is that
it’s related to the fetch API somehow, because if you set the
undocumented useFetchStreams option to false in the Firebase client,
then it falls back to XMLHttpRequest (which jsdom implements) and
things work again.
user.firestore({ useFetchStreams: false, merge: true })
My advice would be to run the Firestore tests in the default Node.js
environment instead of the jsdom environment. This may be by using a
dedicated jest.config.js, or simply running your Firestore tests
separately from the rest of your frontend test suite and passing --env node to override the value from jest.config.js:
npx jest --env node firestore.test.js
Last resort, the useFetchStreams hack above should do it. 😄