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mounting.md

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Credentials

Credentials for use with GCS will automatically be loaded using Google application default credentials, unless the flag --key-file is set to a path to a JSON key file downloaded from the Google Developers Console.

The easiest way to set up credentials when running on Google Compute Engine is to create your VM with a service account using the storage-full access scope. (See here for details on VM service accounts.) When gcsfuse is run from such a VM, it automatically has access to buckets owned by the same project as the VM.

When testing, especially on a developer machine, credentials can also be configured using the gcloud tool:

gcloud auth login

Alternatively, you can set the GOOGLE_APPLICATION_CREDENTIALS environment variable to the path to a JSON key file downloaded from the Google Developers Console:

GOOGLE_APPLICATION_CREDENTIALS=/path/to/key.json gcsfuse [...]

When mounting with an fstab entry, you can use the key_file option. For example:

my-bucket /mount/point gcsfuse rw,noauto,user,key_file=/path/to/key.json

Basic usage

Mounting

Say you want to mount the GCS bucket called my-bucket. First create the directory into which you want to mount the gcsfuse bucket, then run gcsfuse:

mkdir /path/to/mount/point
gcsfuse my-bucket /path/to/mount/point

Important: You should run gcsfuse as the user who will be using the file system, not as root. Similarly, the directory should be owned by that user. Do not use sudo for either of the steps above or you will wind up with permissions issues.

After the gcsfuse tool exits, you should be able to see your bucket contents if you run ls /path/to/mount/point. If you would prefer the tool to stay in the foreground (for example to see debug logging), run it with the --foreground flag.

Unmounting

On Linux, unmount using fuse's fusermount tool:

fusermount -u /path/to/mount/point

On OS X, unmount like any other file system:

umount /path/to/mount/point

Access permissions

As a security measure, fuse itself restricts file system access to the user who mounted the file system (cf. fuse.txt). For this reason, gcsfuse by default shows all files as owned by the invoking user. Therefore you should invoke gcsfuse as the user that will be using the file system, not as root.

If you know what you are doing, you can override these behaviors with the allow_other mount option supported by fuse and with the --uid and --gid flags supported by gcsfuse. Be careful, this may have security implications!

mount(8) and fstab compatibility

The gcsfuse installation process installed a helper understood by the mount command to your system at one of these two paths, depending on your operating system:

  • Linux: /sbin/mount.gcsfuse
  • OS X: /sbin/mount_gcsfuse

On OS X, this program allows you to mount buckets using the mount command. (On Linux, only root can do this.) For example:

mount -t gcsfuse -o rw,user my-bucket /path/to/mount/point

The following mount options are supported, in addition to the standard ones for your system, matching the semantics of the corresponding gcsfuse flags named with dashes instead of underscores:

  • implicit_dirs
  • dir_mode
  • file_mode
  • key_file
  • temp_dir
  • uid
  • gid
  • only_dir
  • limit_ops_per_sec
  • limit_bytes_per_sec
  • stat_cache_ttl
  • type_cache_ttl

On both OS X and Linux, you can also add entries to your /etc/fstab file like the following:

my-bucket /mount/point gcsfuse rw,noauto,user

Afterward, you can run mount /mount/point as a non-root user.

The noauto option above specifies that the file system should not be mounted at boot time.

You can also mount the file system automatically as a non-root user by specifying the options uid and/or gid:

my-bucket /mount/point gcsfuse rw,uid=1001,gid=1001