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I am running a node server with the firebase admin sdk. However, everytime I try to send a push notification from the server, I get a 401 error.
Here's the exact error I'm getting:
errorInfo: {
code: 'messaging/authentication-error',
message: 'An error occurred when trying to authenticate to the FCM servers. Make sure the credential used to authenticate this SDK has the proper permissions. See https://firebase.google.com/docs/admin/setup for setup instructions. Raw server response: "<HTML>\n' +
'<HEAD>\n' +
'<TITLE>PROJECT_NOT_PERMITTED</TITLE>\n' +
'</HEAD>\n' +
'<BODY BGCOLOR="#FFFFFF" TEXT="#000000">\n' +
'<H1>PROJECT_NOT_PERMITTED</H1>\n' +
'<H2>Error 401</H2>\n' +
'</BODY>\n' +
'</HTML>\n' +
'". Status code: 401.'
},
codePrefix: 'messaging'
I'm not exactly sure why I don't have permissions to the project. I have setup my service account, and downloaded the .json file. I even went into the gcloud platform and tried to add any permission that looked correct. Below are all the permissions associated with my service account:
I am running the server locally, and initialized the app like this:
const admin = require('firebase-admin');
const messaging = require('firebase-admin/messaging');
const serviceAccount = require('<path-to-key>');
const fbApp = admin.initializeApp({
credential: admin.credential.cert(serviceAccount),
projectId: '<PROJECT_ID>',
databaseURL: '<DB_URL>'
});
I am not sure what else to do as I've looked through the v1 documentation multiple times and still don't have any clue as to what permissions I'm lacking. I even made sure to "firebase login" into the correct google account to see if that could've been an issue.
Here's my code to send a message:
const sendPushNotifications2 = async (topic, reminder) => {
const payload = genPayload2(reminder);
//await messaging.getMessaging(fbApp).sendToTopic(topic, payload);
await admin.messaging(fbApp).sendToTopic(topic, payload);
};
I have verified the client_id, client_email, and private_key_id values in the .json file. I haven't yet verified the private_key property because I'm not sure where to find it.
777
asked Sep 09 '25 15:09
The problem is that new Firebase projects have only the new "Firebase Cloud Messaging API (V1)" enabled by default, and with that configuration - the official firebase-admin NodeJS library - that uses the new V1 API - will not be able to send messages and will get 401 PROJECT_NOT_PERMITTED errors.
To be able to send message from your server, you MUST also enable the older "legacy" API.
139
It turns out that I had this API disabled: "Firebase In-App Messaging API" It also turns out that this question was asked before, but I wasn't able to find it. Here's the answer
If anyone else runs into this issue this was my fix:
APIs and ServicesEnabled APIs & Services+ Enable APIs and ServicesFirebase In-App Messaging API and make sure it's enabled.You can also just search for messaging and make sure that all the cloud messaging APIs are enabled.
42
answered Sep 12 '25 11:09
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