How would one run a Node.js script on Firebase?

Question

I have a Node app/script that needs to constantly be running (it's a discord bot, done with discord.js , but I think that's mostly irrelevant), and I'd like to do it on Firebase.
It has its own client.on('event', ()=>{}) events system, so I don't believe that I could use Firebase's cloud functions. There's also what seems to be a website-hosting based way to have a node.js server, but that seems triggered by HTTP requests.
Is there any other way I could do it?

Answer 1

There is no way to run arbitrary node.js code on Firebase. Unless your script can run within Cloud Functions "triggered execution" mode, you'll need your own app server to run it.

You can of course create a service that maps Discord.js events to Firebase events, such as writes to the Realtime Database, Cloud Firestore, even just direct HTTPS calls to a Cloud Functions endpoint. You could even bypass Firebase there and have your mapping service write to Cloud PubSub and use that to trigger Cloud Functions.

One thing that looks promising in the Discord.js documentation is their mention of web hooks , which is just another way of describing HTTP endpoints. But from my quick scan I couldn't figure out if those would allow you to call your HTTP triggered Cloud Function.