Installation Guide Part 2

Configuring a Firebase Project

This page covers the undimmed parts of the flow.

Step 1 - Configure a Firebase Project

Firebase is an application back-end platform service by Google. OmniTrack For Research makes use of Firebase under the hood, regarding the participants' authentication(sign in) via Gmail account, and cloud messaging.

Therefore, to allow your OmniTrack server to communicate with Firebase, you must configure your own Firebase project and make a connection with your OmniTrack server.

Initial Configuration of Firebase Project

1. Create new Firebase project at https://console.firebase.google.com

   

2. Now click the cog button beside the Project Overview, and go to Project settings.

   
   
   

3. Go to Service accounts -> Firebase Admin SDK tab -> and click Generate new private key.

   
   

   The browser will ask you to download a JSON file. Store the file in your private folder and archive it.
   You will need it on the installation wizard of the OmniTrack backend server later.

Step 2 - Complete an installation wizard

On your web browser, connect to

[SERVER_ADDRESS]

If everything was successful, you will see this screen:

Follow and complete the steps on the server initialization panel.

1. Register admin researchers. You can register e-mail addresses of whom will be administrators of the research dashboard, before they sign up. The system will automatically give the admin privileges to researcher accounts with the registered e-mails.

   These are what admin researchers can do:

   1. Approve or reject normal researcher accounts.
   2. Build and manage master apps (covered in the next step).
   3. Explorer mobile app error logs.

   Admin researchers cannot see or access to the experiments that they are not participating in.

   Note that you must register your e-mail account to use the research dashboard.

2. Set JWT secret. JWT secret is an arbitrary text that is used to securely generated private keys in the authorization process. Insert any arbitrary text you want to use.

3. Register Firebase admin certificate. Register the JSON file you downloaded from the Firebase Admin SDK settings.

After completing the installation wizard, sign up the research dashboard with the e-mail you registered as a super-user, and sign in.

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Next: Part 3: Building a master app