Q:

Firebase authenticate and authorize

I am designing a website on GAE with Firebase tools which will grant access to files and database information.
Through working the Authentication Quick Start, it is clear how to authenticate users and in the Quick Start for Database to use that information to grant access to file storage and database fields.
In addition to that, I want to be able to grant file and database access to GROUPS of users. 
I found a nice article by Kapil Sachdeva which solves the problem by storing group data in the firebase database and enforcing access with database rules, 
but to be thorough....
Is there an API already built to handle this, or must I roll my own group manager?

A:

The Firebase security rules have no built-in knowledge of groups or roles. The article you linked shows one way to build that. We're currently finalizing a blog post that describes it too. But what these have in common is that they use the Firebase security rules to implement their own security model.

