Why do I get "Client is not yet ready to issue requests" - Firestore get() fails when called by Schedule function

Question

In my Firebase project I have a functions.pubsub.schedule().onRun() that runs every 5 minutes to perform some calendar related tasks. It needs to look up in my Firestore collections and does so with a.get() query. This has been working fine until sometime 2020-03-13 in the morning where the function started to throw

2020-03-13 09:36:02.326 CET scheduledHooks 1042277797598294
Error: INTERNAL ERROR: Client is not yet ready to issue requests. 
at Firestore.get projectId [as projectId] (/srv/functions/node_modules/@google-cloud/firestore/build/src/index.js:401:19) 
at Query.toProto (/srv/functions/node_modules/@google-cloud/firestore/build/src/reference.js:1556:42)     at Query._get (/srv/functions/node_modules/@google-cloud/firestore/build/src/reference.js:1466:30) 
at Query.get (/srv/functions/node_modules/@google-cloud/firestore/build/src/reference.js:1457:21) 
at FirebaseActivitiesCollection.<anonymous> (/srv/functions/lib/collections/activities/FirebaseActivitiesCollection.js:32:40) 
at Generator.next (<anonymous>) at /srv/functions/lib/collections/activities/FirebaseActivitiesCollection.js:8:71 
at new Promise (<anonymous>) at __awaiter (/srv/functions/lib/collections/activities/FirebaseActivitiesCollection.js:4:12) 
at FirebaseActivitiesCollection.getActivitiesByInterval (/srv/functions/lib/collections/activities/FirebaseActivitiesCollection.js:27:16)

I can't track that I have changed anything, could it be that Firebase made some changes that I should be aware of or am I missing an obvious clue in this error message?

My other Cloud Functions and the Firebase JavaScript SDK still work fine.

Extra info: The same code works on my other environment where I have not deployed. This of course led me to search for changes in the deployed code, but I can't find any??

Answer 1

It seems by the error, that the project was not connected and initialized correctly. As per the official API here , this error occurs when:

Returns the Project ID for this Firestore instance. Validates that initializeIfNeeded() was called before.

I would recommend you to check that. In case you are still facing, I would say for you to contact the Firebase Free Support . Since you mentioned that it was working until yesterday morning, it might be some change on their side.

Hope this helps!

Answer 2

This turned out to be a very simple matter of initialization of Firebase:

Before I had:

// Initialize firebase
admin.initializeApp(functions.config().firebase)

..And it worked fine until it didn't anymore.

Now I have:

// Initialize firebase
admin.initializeApp()

... And it works again

Answer 3

Got the same error while running some jest tests involving firebase. Problem was that I didn't have GOOGLE_APPLICATION_CREDENTIALS environment variable set.

Since I was running them locally on my machine, exporting this variable in terminal before running the tests was sufficient for my case:

export GOOGLE_APPLICATION_CREDENTIALS=/path/to/credentials/file.json