Firenook - Rust-powered Firebase emulators with 40× faster writes
Show HN: Firenook – Firebase emulators in Rust: 40× faster writes, 10× less RAM
Firenook is a drop-in replacement for the Firebase Local Emulator Suite, built in Rust. Keep your firebase.json, SDKs, and ports—just change one word in your script. It emulates eight services including Firestore, Authentication, Cloud Storage, Cloud Functions, Pub/Sub, Cloud Tasks, Eventarc, and Extensions, with no Java required. Benchmarks on a real production app show 40× faster writes, 10× less memory, and restarts with data kept in 0.59 seconds instead of 30.8. A built-in console covers every service, and an MCP mode gives coding agents 54 tools to debug against the emulator instead of production. It's open source under Apache 2.0 and installs via npm.
Add --keep-data and Firestore, Auth and Storage come back with all your data in about half a second, even with millions of documents—no export at every stop, no import at every start.
- jamest
(Firebase founder) This is very cool! Great work!
- joshdavham
Looks nice!
Somewhat off topic question though: if you guys are such skilled developers to be building something as involved as this, why not just use something other than Firebase? I used Firebase mainly as a crutch when I was first getting into web dev, but feel that I’ve sorta outgrown it. Do you feel Firebase still serves developers like you well or are you developing this moreso for people like my old self?
Again, nice work!
- silverlight
This is really neat! I've been working on an open-source version of the Firebase Realtime Database as well that might be of interest[1]. Also written in Rust! Might be a good basis for building out the Realtime Database part of Firenook if you have any interest in supporting that as well.