Support for gcloud firestore and datastore emulators with java 17 or earlier is ending on July 01, 2025

[anindyatahsin]

The Cloud Firestore & Cloud Datastore emulators dependency is being updated from Java 11 to Java 21, this will occur at the end of June 2025 with gcloud release 529.0.0. After this change, the Datastore and Firestore emulators (gcloud beta emulators datastore start, gcloud beta emulators firestore start) in environments with Java versions prior to 21 will fail to start and raise the following error:

ERROR: (gcloud.beta.emulators.datastore.start) The java executable on your PATH is not a Java 21+ JRE. The Google Cloud Datastore emulator requires a Java 21+ JRE installed and on your system PATH.

To fix this, users of the :latest images can migrate to using the :emulators Docker image which is a dedicated image for the gcloud emulators. Alternatively they can use their own Dockerfile to upgrade to Java 21 or above to continue using the latest Datastore and Firestore emulators (Example) or pin to gcloud version 528.0.0 or earlier where the prior java versions were supported.

For any questions or concerns about the change, reach out to the gcloud support team.