I've created an app that makes calls to Firebase. The Firebase API has given instructions to test the application, via firebase serve and firebase deploy. I know that firebase serve creates a local server instance at localhost:5000.
Is there a difference in this case between running npm start and firebase serve, besides the port number? Are they just the same thing, if you have a react application that uses Firebase?
npm scripts are defined in your project's package.json. So, if the "start" script defined there is "firebase serve", then there is no practical difference between firebase serve and npm start for that project.