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
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.
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
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!
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