Cloud Hosting

In this short guide, we will go through the steps to import a simple text file from Google Cloud Storage (GCS) to Google Colab.

We must first authenticate ourselves to fetch resources from GCS:

from google.colab import auth

auth.authenticate_user()

This will open up a popup - log in with the same account that hosts the file on Google Cloud Platform (GCP).

Set the current GCP project to the one where your file resides on GCS:

project_id = 'gcs-project-354207'

!gcloud config set project {project_id}

Updated property [core/project].

To get the GCP project ID required in the above step, log into GCP console and click on the dropdown menu in the header:

This will show a list of all your projects on GCP as well as the corresponding IDs:

Now, suppose we have a file called sample.txt under the bucket example-bucket-skytowner on GCS. To download this file into the root directory of our Colab machine, use the pre-installed gsutil cp command:

bucket_name = 'example-bucket-skytowner'

# Download the file from the given Google Cloud Storage bucket.

!gsutil cp gs://{bucket_name}/sample.txt sample.txt

Here, cp stands for copy.

If the downloaded file does not appear on the left side panel, manually hit the refresh button below:

We should see our sample.txt file in the root directory of our Colab machine:

Excerpt from:
Reading file from Google Cloud Storage in Google Colab