Firebase Emulator slow when using 0.0.0.0 host

Question

I’m having an issue setting up the Firebase Emulator on a Mac Mini with Apple Silicon (M1 chip).

Every request I send to Firestore (using the emulator) takes a very long time to complete (sometimes it never completes and I get a network error saying the backend couldn’t be reached):

@firebase/firestore: Firestore (8.2.5): Could not reach Cloud Firestore backend. Backend didn't respond within 10 seconds. This typically indicates that your device does not have a healthy Internet connection at the moment. The client will operate in offline mode until it is able to successfully connect to the backend.

It turns out this is happening because I'm setting host to 0.0.0.0 in the firebase.json file. If I remove the host field or if I set it to be localhost, then I don’t have any issues.

This is my firebase.json file:

{
  "firestore": {
    "rules": "./firestore.rules"
  },
  "emulators": {
    "firestore": {
      "host": "0.0.0.0",
      "port": 8080
    }
  }
}

The reason I'm setting it to 0.0.0.0 is because I need to test my app on a different machine (i.e. on a tablet) and the only way we managed to make it work was setting the host to be 0.0.0.0 since this host will resolve all addresses associated with our machine. This way, I can access the emulator using my local IP address (i.e. 192.168.0.1).

I noticed this issue only happens on the new Mac with the M1 Apple Silicon chip. So, I wonder if this has anything to do with the way M1 is resolving the IP address.

Any ideas?

Answer 1

I'm still not sure if this is M1-specific since I haven't been able to test this on another M1 machine but adding my computer's name next to localhost in the hosts file seems to have fixed this issue:

127.0.0.1    localhost Will.local
::1          localhost Will.local