At the time of writing this gist (January 4th, 2017), I was unable to find true sandboxing to separate development and production environments for a Firebase project. The closest we can get is to create two separate Firebase projects -- one for development and one for production.
- Complete separation and isolation of all Firebase features.
- Freedom to experiment without risking the corruption of production data.
- There is no way to copy production data to your development project (that I am aware of).
- Any settings changes made to your development project also needs to be manually applied to your production project.