I Broke My Own Firestore Rules in Production Once. Now the Emulator Catches It First.
The deploy that taught me the lesson I changed one line in my Firestore security rules. It looked safe — I was tightening a read rule on a collection so only the owning tenant could read its documents. I deployed it, moved on, and found out later that a legitimate read path had started failing. Nothing dramatic broke in a way that paged me. It just quietly stopped working for a real user flow,…
I broke my own Firestore security rules in production once. It happened when I made a single change to a read rule on a collection, thinking it would only allow the owning tenant to read its documents. However, the change caused a legitimate read path to fail silently for a real user. I only caught the bug after manually testing the flow, as the issue was not caught by tests for my API or scoring logic.
The issue highlighted the need to test Firestore rules, as they are authorization logic that should never ship untested. Firestore rules fail silently in production, making it difficult to detect issues until users report problems. The setup I now use includes testing rules with the Firebase Emulator Suite in CI, and making the deploy pipeline refuse to ship rules that fail those tests.
Written by urgent.news from Dev.to's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
