Does CLI have a flag for specifying Data Connect Emulator PGLite Database strings ?

[HassanBahati]

My goal is to start the Data Connect Emulator in non-interactive environments such as a GitHub Action this is what I found in the documentations Start the emulator

I have tried starting a Data Connect Emulator locally by running the command below;

firebase emulators:start --only dataconnect --project test

but fails with the following logs

% firebase emulators:start --only dataconnect --project test
i  emulators: Starting emulators: dataconnect
i  dataconnect: downloading dataconnect-emulator-1.3.6...
Progress: ===================================================================================================================================> (100% of 25MB)
i  dataconnect: Removing outdated emulator files: dataconnect-emulator-1.7.0
i  dataconnect: Data Connect Emulator logging to dataconnect-debug.log
i  emulators: Shutting down emulators.
i  dataconnect: Stopping Data Connect Emulator
⚠  Data Connect Emulator has exited upon receiving signal: SIGINT
i  hub: Stopping emulator hub

Error: No Postgres connection string found in '.firebaserc'. The Data Connect emulator will not be able to execute operations.
Run firebase setup:emulators:dataconnect to set up a Postgres connection.

Is it that it is a must to have a .firebaserc in my directory ?
seems the .firebaserc is meant to contain the Postgres connection string, is there a way to define this using a flag so that i could execute a command in a github action to start the emulator ??

The Documentation at Use the Data Connect emulator for CI/CD doesnt seem to talk about a database setup or specification..

I am really curious to know how the Data Connect emulator is meant to be setup to run in non-interactive environments like Github Actions ?

FYI: The Data Connect Emulator starts, runs and works fine when i use the Firebase Data Connect Emulator VsCode Extension without a Postgres connection setup in the .firebaserc file

[HassanBahati]

CC: @joehan

[joehan]

Sorry for the slow reply here! You can also provide this value via theFIREBASE_DATACONNECT_POSTGRESQL_STRING env var, like so:

export FIREBASE_DATACONNECT_POSTGRESQL_STRING=postgres://localhost:5432/mydatabase?sslmode=disable
firebase emulators:start

On a separate note, you'll generally want to use emulators:exec when running in noninteractive environments

[HassanBahati]

thank you @joehan , i will be sure to try this