[SOLVED] Can't init firebase cloud storage due to cloud resource location

Can't init firebase cloud storage due to cloud resource location

I’m using Firebase emulators to develop and test Cloud Functions locally, and one of my use cases involves uploading a file to Cloud Storage. As part of this process, I initialize Firebase emulators with the Cloud Storage service as follows:

npx firebase init emulators

=== Emulators Setup
? Which Firebase emulators do you want to set up? Press Space to select emulators, then Enter to confirm your choices. Storage 
Emulator
? Which port do you want to use for the storage emulator? 9199
? Would you like to enable the Emulator UI? Yes
? Which port do you want to use for the Emulator UI (leave empty to use any available port)? 
? Would you like to download the emulators now? Yes

Then I tried starting firebase emulators for cloud storage, but got an error:

npx firebase emulators:start --only storage

Error: Cannot start the Storage emulator without rules file specified in firebase.json: run 'firebase init' and set up your Storage configuration

This makes sense because the storage.rules file needs to be created before the emulators can start up Cloud Storage. So, next I ran:

npx firebase init storage

=== Storage Setup
Error: Cloud resource location is not set for this project but the operation you are attempting to perform in Cloud Storage requires it. Please see this documentation for more details: https://firebase.google.com/docs/projects/locations

I went to the Firebase Console, enabled storage, and selected the service location, matching the location of all other Firebase services I’m using. However, even after a few hours, I keep receiving the same error message, as if my local Firebase setup doesn’t recognize that the storage service has been activated.

Environment Details:

•   macOS Sequoia 15.0
•   VS Code 1.95.1
•   Node.js v18 (also tried with v20 and v22)
•   Firebase CLI 13.23.1

Solution