After upgrading firebase-admin, firebase-functions, and typescript and making some changes in my cloud functions to accommodate stricter types in express, I had one last nagging problem. When running firebase serve the functions would not load properly because functions.config() was returning an empty object. This was confusing because we make sure to create the .runtimeconfig.json file whenever we run npm start (which creates the file and then runs firebase serve). After several hours of digging around trying to figure out why this was happening I gave up for the day … or so I thought. I came back to this problem after laying in bed and came across a comment left 6 hours ago that got me pointed in the right direction. After running npm list -depth=0 to see what the actual version of firebase-tools I was using (@7.16.2). I upgraded my Angular app and my Firebase functions app.
npm install --save-dev firebase-tools@latest
This brought firebase-tools to version @8.2.0 and everything started working again.
🍾 🎉