How to properly deploy PHP app with Firestore on Google Cloud Platform?

Question

I'm setting up a PHP app with Cloud Firestore on Google Cloud Platform based on https://github.com/googleapis/google-cloud-php-firestore.

After deploying to App Engine, I see that "new FirestoreClient();" doesn't work, but the same code runs normally on localhost. How can I fix this?

The code:

index.php

<?php

require_once 'vendor/autoload.php';
use Google\Cloud\Firestore\FirestoreClient;

echo "Hello Firestore";

$firestore = new FirestoreClient();
$collectionReference = $firestore->collection('boards');
$documentReference = $collectionReference->document("b-1");
$snapshot = $documentReference->snapshot();
$data = $snapshot->data();
var_dump($data);

echo "Goodbye Firestore";
?>

app.yaml

runtime: php72

handlers:
- url: /favicon\.ico
  static_files: favicon.ico
  upload: favicon\.ico

- url: /images
  static_dir: images

- url: /stylesheets
  static_dir: stylesheets

Google Cloude Platform logs

GET 200 385 B 1,3 s Chrome 74 / I GET 200 385 B 1,3 s Chrome 74
nginx: [warn] the "user" directive makes sense only if the master process runs with super-user privileges, ignored in /tmp/google-config/nginx.conf:3 
A GET 200 107,58 KiB 2 ms Chrome 74 /images/logo.png A GET 200 107,58 KiB 2 ms Chrome 74

composer.json

{
    "name": "projects/plzwork",
    "description": "i don't know...",
    "type": "project",
    "license": "Apache-2.0",
    "require": {
        "google/cloud": "^0.101.0",
        "grpc/grpc": "^1.19"
    }
}

Output with localhost

Hello Firestore

array(4) { ["headline"]=> string(1) "b" ["amount_of_threads"]=> int(1) ["description"]=> string(22) "Flood and nothing else" ["content_type"]=> string(7) "default" }

Goodbye Firestore

Output with Google Cloud Platform

Hello Firestore

Database view

Answer 1

I think you might be missing a php.ini file to enable the grpc extension which Cloud Firestore requires:

php.ini

extension=grpc.so

Include this file with your application. Check out these docs:

• The php.ini file in App Engine
• App Engine dynamically loadable extensions

Also, you mentioned not seeing any errors in your logs. The errors might've been reported in different files that aren't visible by default. Here's how to view them in the console: