`auth:export` fails after 60 minutes with TypeError: Cannot read properties of undefined (reading 'access_token')

[MattSkala]

[REQUIRED] Environment info

firebase-tools: 14.4.0

Platform: macOS

[REQUIRED] Test case

firebase auth:export auth.csv --project <project-id> --debug

[REQUIRED] Steps to reproduce

Run firebase auth:export auth.csv --project <project-id> --debug for a large project with > 10M users.

[REQUIRED] Expected behavior

The script should succeed with all the accounts exported.

[REQUIRED] Actual behavior

The command fails after exactly 60 minutes with the following error on the output. There are only about 5M users exported in the CSV.

[2025-05-22T08:46:30.588Z] >>> [apiv2][body] POST https://www.googleapis.com/identitytoolkit/v3/relyingparty/downloadAccount {"targetProjectId":"fitify-app","maxResults":1000,"nextPageToken":"HWgDqeyrQdhp9F18qE2ETlcZij72"}
[2025-05-22T08:46:30.730Z] <<< [apiv2][status] POST https://www.googleapis.com/identitytoolkit/v3/relyingparty/downloadAccount 401
[2025-05-22T08:46:30.730Z] <<< [apiv2][body] POST https://www.googleapis.com/identitytoolkit/v3/relyingparty/downloadAccount [omitted]
[2025-05-22T08:46:30.731Z] Got a 401 Unauthenticated error for a call that required authentication. Refreshing tokens.
[2025-05-22T08:46:30.732Z] No OAuth tokens found
[2025-05-22T08:46:30.732Z] No OAuth tokens found
[2025-05-22T08:46:30.732Z] > command requires scopes: ["email","openid","https://www.googleapis.com/auth/cloudplatformprojects.readonly","https://www.googleapis.com/auth/firebase","https://www.googleapis.com/auth/cloud-platform"]
[2025-05-22T08:46:30.779Z] Running auto auth
[2025-05-22T08:46:30.785Z] TypeError: Cannot read properties of undefined (reading 'access_token')
    at getAccessToken (/Users/fitify/.cache/firebase/tools/lib/node_modules/firebase-tools/lib/apiv2.js:43:17)
    at process.processTicksAndRejections (node:internal/process/task_queues:95:5)
    at async RetryOperation._fn (/Users/fitify/.cache/firebase/tools/lib/node_modules/firebase-tools/lib/apiv2.js:303:40)

Error: An unexpected error has occurred.

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[joehan]

Hi @MattSkala, sorry to hear that you are running into this. It looks your the OAuth refresh token is expiring in the middle of the command. I will take a look at the auth logic that is misbehving here, but as an immediate workaround, you can use a service account instead (as described in https://stackoverflow.com/questions/59053919/login-to-firebase-using-gcloud-service-account). Service account credentials are long lived, so they will not run into this problem.

[MattSkala]

@joehan Thanks for your response. However, I already am using the service account defined in GOOGLE_APPLICATION_CREDENTIALS env variable for authentication. Do you have any other ideas for a possible workaround?

[aalej]

Hey @MattSkala, could you try authenticating via firebase login? I tried to reproduce this issue and it seems like this occurs when using GOOGLE_APPLICATION_CREDENTIALS. When trying with credentials from firebase login, the export completes without any issues even after running for ~2 hours.

For context, I can’t replicate the scenario with 10M users, so I created ~20K users and manually modified my local firebase-tools and lowered the batch size to 1 to make the export run longer https://github.com/firebase/firebase-tools/blob/5409db808d386e8fa26bfb3224b57f2e41e664f4/src/commands/auth-export.ts#L11

After doing the changes and authenticating with GOOGLE_APPLICATION_CREDENTIALS, I’m able to encounter the issue

[2025-06-11T19:13:58.326Z] Running auto auth
[2025-06-11T19:13:58.335Z] TypeError: Cannot read properties of undefined (reading 'access_token')
    at getAccessToken (/usr/local/lib/node_modules/firebase-tools/lib/apiv2.js:43:17)
    at process.processTicksAndRejections (node:internal/process/task_queues:95:5)
    at async RetryOperation._fn (/usr/local/lib/node_modules/firebase-tools/lib/apiv2.js:303:40)

[egorkel-altexsoft]

Same here. We can't use firebase login because we are running on CI. We use GOOGLE_APPLICATION_CREDENTIALS with the service account. Functions deployment takes time, sometimes more than 1 hour. We start experiencing this issue after updating from v13 to v14. Please fix it or give an advice how to workaround it. Thanks.