Cannot call `getSignedUrl` when using authorized_user default credentials locally

[Derrreks]

[READ] Step 1: Are you in the right place?

• For issues related to the code in this repository file a Github issue.
• If the issue pertains to Cloud Firestore, read the instructions in the "Firestore issue" template.
• For general technical questions, post a question on StackOverflow with the firebase tag.
• For general Firebase discussion, use the firebase-talk google group.
• For help troubleshooting your application that does not fall under one of the above categories, reach out to the personalized Firebase support channel.

[REQUIRED] Step 2: Describe your environment

• Operating System version: macOS 11.7.9
• Firebase SDK version: firebase-admin 11.11.0
• Firebase Product: Cloud Storage
• Node.js version: 18
• NPM version: 9.9.0

[REQUIRED] Step 3: Describe the problem

Steps to reproduce:

What happened? How can we make the problem occur? This could be a description, log/console output, etc.

I'm initializing like:

export const admin = firebaseAdmin.initializeApp({
  credential: firebaseAdmin.credential.applicationDefault(),
  ...

but when I do that am unable to call Bucket.file().getSignedUrl() with the error:

Error: Cannot sign data without `client_email`

Looking into my local Firebase credentials, I notice there is no client_email there, but there is when using service accounts. I've found some issues around that seem to say this isn't possible with a personal service account (example).

If that's true, is it not possible at all to use my personal service account to work with files? Or is there a workaround that will enable this to work?

[google-oss-bot]

I couldn't figure out how to label this issue, so I've labeled it for a human to triage. Hang tight.

[ottob]

We have the same issue. It would be great to see a proper solution to this.

As a workaround we made a special cloud function (that is always running in the cloud) that generates signed urls that we call instead of the normal getSignedUrl functions when running in the emulator.