Documentation failing to build on docs.rs

[officialpiyush]

I am trying to use firestore crate, which is dependent on this crate for authentication. I want to use my service account configuration with it, so I tried to check the documentation of this crate for reference, but it shows that the documentation build wasn't successful.

[abdolence]

Hey, I think docs.rs is failing because of this crate has a lot of crate features defined (docs.rs pipeline throws out of memory errors). I'll try to investigate if it is possible to do something about it.

There is a section about Google authentication that may answer your question:
https://github.com/abdolence/gcloud-sdk-rs#google-authentication

Also you can ask here what you want to achieve.

[officialpiyush]

Hey @abdolence, appreciate the quick response, I saw the Google authentication part in the README, though I was looking if we could manually specify the path of the service account, instead of using environment variables. It is worth mentioning that I am using firestore crate. I have the service account file (from Firebase), just wondering if we have an option to manually set the file location.

[abdolence]

The way this is currently implemented is somehow similar how Google itself implements this in their client libraries.
(https://cloud.google.com/docs/authentication/client-libraries).

The important part is that on production you usually rely on the GKE/GCE/Cloud Run etc environments that configure service accounts for you themselves, and you should use it from the "environment". Creating and managing JSON files manually is considered less secure approach nowadays.

Theoretically speaking It is possible to implement even more options to specify it explicitly, but I don't remember that I have had the implementation to use it directly that way right now. I need a bit more input to understand what is the purposes for this - development, production?

Of course there is a workaround, so you can just specify it as environment variable in the code (e.g. https://doc.rust-lang.org/std/env/fn.set_var.html).

[officialpiyush]

Thanks for the info!

I am trying to upload some data from the system, and then save it to Firestore, to be later accessed from the web. The binary would be built and distributed. I could just add an instruction to set the environment variable, but it may have chances that it may collide with their own development environment. I could use the set_var, sure, was just looking if there was any native option provided by the library.

[abdolence]

Thanks for the details. Yes, in your case now I understand more and it is totally makes sense to configure it that way. Right now this library doesn't provide it instead of env bars, so you can leverage it. I'll improve this area in next releases for the cases like yours.

[officialpiyush]

Thanks! Really appreciate the work you are doing! <3

Shall I keep the issue open till the issue with the documentation is solved, or do you want me to close it?

[abdolence]

Appreciate the kind words.
Yes, keep it open. I'm not scared of opened issues especially if they are correct :)

[abdolence]

@officialpiyush
Ok, I browsed the source code and now I remember that in fact we have the way to do everything programmatically:

FirestoreDb::with_options_token_source(
        FirestoreDbOptions::new(config_env_var("PROJECT_ID")?.to_string()),
        gcloud_sdk::GCP_DEFAULT_SCOPES.clone(),
        gcloud_sdk::TokenSourceType::File("/tmp/key.json".into())
    )
    .await?;

It is a bit cumbersome for your purposes, but exposes all possible options.
Let me know if this doesn't work!

[officialpiyush]

I'll try it out and let you know!