How to mount a Google Cloud Bucket in Linux

Google Cloud Storage is Google’s equivalent of Amazon’s S3. And it’s cheaper than S3 and works pretty great.

Today, I’ll be explaining how to mount a Google Cloud Storage bucket to your Linux Machine (Running Debian/Ubuntu) using gcsfuse

A word of advice: gcsfuse mounted bucket is painfully slow for operations involving many files.If you are going to have too many file reading/writing to the Bucket through this mount, this is not adviced. On the other hand, if you are storing big files in small quantities, this is a great way to have cheaper storage

Note: This can be used for any major Debian derivative

Install gcsfuse Link to heading

Enter the following commands one by one

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install curl -y

export GCSFUSE_REPO=gcsfuse-`lsb_release -c -s`
echo "deb http://packages.cloud.google.com/apt $GCSFUSE_REPO main" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/gcsfuse.list
curl https://packages.cloud.google.com/apt/doc/apt-key.gpg | sudo apt-key add -

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install gcsfuse

As of now, you should have gcsfuse installed and ready for action. But we will need google-cloud-sdk for authenticating to the Google Storage

Install Google Cloud SDK Link to heading

export CLOUD_SDK_REPO="cloud-sdk-$(lsb_release -c -s)"
echo "deb http://packages.cloud.google.com/apt $CLOUD_SDK_REPO main" | sudo tee -a /etc/apt/sources.list.d/google-cloud-sdk.list
curl https://packages.cloud.google.com/apt/doc/apt-key.gpg | sudo apt-key add -
sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install google-cloud-sdk

Authenticate with Google Cloud Storage Link to heading

Switch to the user you will be mounting your bucket with. And issue the following command

gcloud auth application-default login

This will present you with a URL. Copy that URL and paste it in your browser, login with your Google account. You should see a token on your browser window. Copy it and paste it in the Terminal prompt asking for the verification code.

Once you give the token, you should be authenticated and you can now mount your Bucket.

Mount the bucket Link to heading

Again, switch to the user you want to mount the bucket as. This is important because you cannot change the ownership of the mount. If you mount it with root user, then the mount can only be used by the root user.

mkdir /mnt/google-cloud-bucket
gcsfuse your_bucket_name /mnt/google-cloud-bucket

That’s it, you should have your bucket mounted on your system. You can verify the mount using the df -h command