Cloud Storage for Firebase is tightly integrated with
Google Cloud
. The Firebase SDKs for Cloud Storage
store files directly in
Google Cloud Storage buckets
,
and as your app grows, you can easily integrate other Google Cloud services,
such as managed compute like App Engine or Cloud Functions, or machine
learning APIs like Cloud Vision or Google Translate.
Firebase uses Google Cloud service accounts to operate and manage services
without sharing user credentials. When you create a Firebase project that uses
Cloud Storage, you might notice that a corresponding service account is
already available in your project:
service-<project number>@gcp-sa-firebasestorage.iam.gserviceaccount.com
. See
this
Firebase support guide
for more
information.
Under the hood, Firebase SDKs for Cloud Storage use the default bucket in the
App Engine
no-cost tier. This
allows you to quickly get up and running with Cloud Storage, without
having to put in a credit card or enable a Cloud Billing account. It also
lets you easily share data between Firebase and a Google Cloud project.
Integrating with Google Cloud, including importing existing Cloud Storage
buckets, requires a Firebase project on the Blaze plan. Learn more about the
plans on our
pricing page
.
Google Cloud Storage
You can use the
Google Cloud Storage APIs
to access files uploaded via the Firebase SDKs for Cloud Storage, especially to
perform more complex operations, such as copying or moving a file, or listing
all the files available at a reference.
It's important to note that these requests use Google Cloud Storage
access control options
,
rather than Firebase Authentication and Cloud Storage Security Rules.
APIs
In addition to the Firebase SDKs for Cloud Storage, there are a number of other ways
to access data stored in your Cloud Storage bucket, depending on what you
want to do. If you're accessing data on a server, we offer server side
libraries, as well as a
JSON
and S3 compatible
XML
RESTful API, or if you
need to script changes or perform other administrative tasks, we've got a
command line tool that will come in handy.
Google Cloud server SDKs
Google Cloud offers high-quality server SDKs for a number of
cloud products, including Cloud Storage. These libraries are available in
Node.js
,
Java
,
go
,
Python
,
PHP
,
and
Ruby
.
For more information, including installation instructions, authentication, and
troubleshooting, consult the platform-specific documentation linked above.
Example usage for the Google Cloud Storage SDK is shown below:
Node.js
// Require gcloud
var gcloud = require('google-cloud');
// Enable Cloud Storage
var gcs = gcloud.storage({
projectId: 'grape-spaceship-123',
keyFilename: '/path/to/keyfile.json'
});
// Reference an existing bucket.
var bucket = gcs.bucket('my-existing-bucket');
// Upload a local file to a new file to be created in your bucket.
bucket.upload('/photos/zoo/zebra.jpg', function(err, file) {
if (!err) {
// "zebra.jpg" is now in your bucket.
}
});
// Download a file from your bucket.
bucket.file('giraffe.jpg').download({
destination: '/photos/zoo/giraffe.jpg'
}, function(err) {});
Java
// Enable Cloud Storage
Storage storage = StorageOptions.builder()
.authCredentials(AuthCredentials.createForJson(new FileInputStream("/path/to/my/key.json"))
.build()
.service();
// Upload a local file to a new file to be created in your bucket.
InputStream uploadContent = ...
BlobId blobId = BlobId.of("my-existing-bucket", "zebra.jpg");
BlobInfo blobInfo = BlobInfo.builder(blobId).contentType("text/plain").build();
Blob zebraBlob = storage.create(blobInfo, content);
// Download a file from your bucket.
Blob giraffeBlob = storage.get("my-existing-bucket", "giraffe.jpg", null);
InputStream downloadContent = giraffeBlob.getInputStream();
Go
// Enable Cloud Storage
client, err := storage.NewClient(ctx, option.WithServiceAccountFile("path/to/keyfile.json"))
if err != nil {
log.Fatal(err)
}
// Download a file from your bucket.
rc, err := client.Bucket("my-existing-bucket").Object("giraffe.jpg").NewReader(ctx)
if err != nil {
log.Fatal(err)
}
defer rc.Close()
body, err := ioutil.ReadAll(rc)
if err != nil {
log.Fatal(err)
}
Python
# Import gcloud
from google.cloud import storage
# Enable Cloud Storage
client = storage.Client()
# Reference an existing bucket.
bucket = client.get_bucket('my-existing-bucket')
# Upload a local file to a new file to be created in your bucket.
zebraBlob = bucket.get_blob('zebra.jpg')
zebraBlob.upload_from_filename(filename='/photos/zoo/zebra.jpg')
# Download a file from your bucket.
giraffeBlob = bucket.get_blob('giraffe.jpg')
giraffeBlob.download_as_string()
PHP
// Require gcloud
require 'vendor/autoload.php';
use Google\Cloud\Storage\StorageClient;
// Enable Cloud Storage
$storage = new StorageClient([
'projectId' => 'grape-spaceship-123'
]);
// Reference an existing bucket.
$bucket = $storage->bucket('my-existing-bucket');
// Upload a file to the bucket.
$bucket->upload(
fopen('/photos/zoo/zebra.jpg', 'r')
);
// Download a file from your bucket.
$object = $bucket->object('giraffe.jpg');
$object->downloadToFile('/photos/zoo/giraffe.jpg');
Ruby
# Require gcloud
require "google/cloud"
# Enable Cloud Storage
gcloud = Google::Cloud.new "grape-spaceship-123", "/path/to/keyfile.json"
storage = gcloud.storage
# Reference an existing bucket.
bucket = storage.bucket "my-existing-bucket"
# Upload a file to the bucket.
bucket.create_file "/photos/zoo/zebra.jpg", "zebra.jpg"
# Download a file from your bucket.
file = bucket.file "giraffe.jpg"
file.download "/photos/zoo/#{file.name}"
REST API
If you're using a language without a client library, want to do something that
the client libraries don't do, or just have a favorite HTTP client that you'd
prefer to use, Google Cloud Storage offers APIs for both
JSON
and
XML
.
In addition to these storage data access APIs, to manage Cloud Storage buckets
for use in Firebase projects, you can use the
Cloud Storage for Firebase API
.
gsutil
gsutil
is a command
line tool that gives you direct access to Cloud Storage. You can use
gsutil
to do a wide range of bucket and object management tasks, including:
- Uploading, downloading, and deleting objects.
- Listing buckets and objects.
- Moving, copying, and renaming objects.
- Editing object and bucket ACLs.
gsutil
allow for other advanced operations, such as moving files from one
directory to another, or deleting all the files below a certain location.
Moving all the files from one reference to another is as easy as:
gsutil mv gs://bucket/old/reference gs://bucket/new/reference
Batch deleting all the files below a reference is similarly intuitive:
# Delete all files under a path
gsutil rm -r gs://bucket/reference/to/delete
# Delete all the files in a bucket but not the bucket
gsutil rm -r gs://bucket/**
# Delete all the files AND the bucket
# Removing the default bucket will break the Firebase SDKs for Cloud Storage and
is strongly discouraged
gsutil rm -r gs://bucket
Request Rates
Google Cloud Storage is a highly scalable service that uses auto-scaling
technology to achieve very high request rates.
Google Cloud Storage is a multi-tenant service, meaning that users share
the same set of underlying resources. In order to make the best use of these
shared resources, buckets have an initial IO capacity.
As you plan to integrate Cloud Storage for Firebase into your app, think about
a minimum request rate your app needs for good performance, and about making
requests efficiently. Review guidelines about
request rates
,
and especially
ramping up request rates
.
Object Versioning
Have you ever deleted something by accident and not had a backup?
Google Cloud Storage supports
Object Versioning
,
which provides an automatic way to back your data up, and restore from those
backups. You can enable Object Versioning using the
gsutil
versioning set
command:
gsutil versioning set on gs://<your-cloud-storage-bucket>
Cloud Storage always picks up the most recent version, so if you want to
restore an object, you need to use one of the other APIs or tools above to set
the desired object as the most recent.
Object Lifecycle Management
Having the ability to automatically archive or delete stale files is a useful
feature for many applications. Luckily, Google Cloud Storage provides
Object Lifecycle Management
,
which allows you to delete or archive objects after a certain amount of time.
Consider a photo sharing application that you want all photos to be deleted
within one day. You can set up an object lifecycle policy as follows:
// lifecycle.json
{
"lifecycle": {
"rule":
[
{
"action": {"type": "Delete"},
"condition": {"age": 1}
}
]
}
}
And deploy it using the
gsutil
lifecycle set
command:
gsutil lifecycle set lifecycle.json gs://<your-cloud-storage-bucket>
Note that this applies to all files in the bucket, so if
you're storing important user backups you want to store for a long time along
side photos that you want to delete daily, you might want to use two separate
buckets or perform deletions manually with
gsutil
or your own server.
App Engine
App Engine is a "Platform as a Service" that automatically scales backend
logic in response to the amount of traffic it receives. Just upload your backend
code and Google will manage your app's availability; there are no servers for
you to provision or maintain. App Engine is a fast and easy way to add
additional processing power or trusted execution to your Firebase application.
The Firebase SDKs for Cloud Storage use the App Engine default bucket, which means
that if you build an App Engine app, you can use the built-in App Engine
APIs to share data between Firebase and App Engine. This is useful for
performing audio encoding, video transcoding, and image transformations, as well
as other computation intensive background processing.
The Java, Python, and go
Standard environments
for App Engine include the App Engine Images API
(
Java
,
Python
, which can
resize, rotate, flip, and crop an image, as well as return an image serving URL
which allows for client side transformations, similar to Cloudinary and Imgix.
When importing an existing Google Cloud project into Firebase, if you want to
make any existing App Engine objects available in Firebase, you'll need to set
the default access control on your objects to allow Firebase to access them by
running the following command using
gsutil
:
gsutil -m acl ch -r -u service-<project number;gt@gcp-sa-firebasestorage.iam.gserviceaccount.com gs://<your-cloud-storage-bucket>
Known Issues
There are two known cases where you can't import your App Engine app:
- The project contains a former App Engine Datastore Master/Slave
app.
- The project has a domain prefixed project ID, for example:
domain.com:project-1234
.
In either of these cases, the project won't support Cloud Storage for Firebase,
and you should create a new Firebase project in order to use
Cloud Storage.
Contact support
so that we can help you out.
Google Cloud Functions (Beta)
Google Cloud Functions
is a
lightweight, event-based, asynchronous compute solution that allows you to
create small, single-purpose functions that respond to events without the need
to manage a server or a runtime environment. These functions can be used for
transcoding video, classifying images using machine learning, or syncing
metadata with the Firebase Realtime Database. With even less overhead than
App Engine, Cloud Functions is the fastest way to react to changes in
Cloud Storage.
Google Cloud Vision API
The
Google Cloud Vision API
enables
developers to understand the content of an image by encapsulating powerful
machine learning models in an easy to use API. It quickly classifies images into
thousands of categories, detects individual objects and faces within images,
finds and reads printed words contained within images, identifies offensive
content, and even provides image sentiment analysis.
Google Cloud Speech API
Similar to the Vision API, the
Google Cloud Speech API
enables
developers to extract text from an audio file stored in Cloud Storage.
The API recognizes over 80 languages and variants, to support your global user
base. When combined with the
Google Cloud Natural Language API
,
developers can both extract the raw text and infer meaning about that text.
And if a global audience is required, couple this with the
Google Translate API
to translate
the text to 90+ languages.