I have a django app running in my Google Compute Engine, and it needs to upload video files to my bucket in Google Cloud Storage. When searching for authentication methods, I found this doc. Under Setting the scope of service account access for instances section, it says I need to enable the Cloud Platform access in the settings when creating the VM. I wonder if it is a must and if there's any other way that I can access my cloud storage bucket from my apps in the compute engine. Because creating a new VM and set up the environment is very time-consuming. Any input would be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance.
As documented on the page you linked to, to authenticate from Google Compute Engine to Google Cloud Storage, you have several options:
Use VM scopes: this must be set before creating the VM, because scopes are immutable once the VM is created. If you want read-only access, you need to add the scope devstorage.read_only (short form) or https://www.googleapis.com/auth/devstorage.read_only (full path). If you want read-write access, you should use the scope devstorage.read_write (short form) or https://www.googleapis.com/auth/devstorage.read_write (full path).
Note: there's also a feature gcloud beta compute instances set-scopes to update GCE VM scopes at runtime.
An alternative to using scopes is to use JSON authentication tokens, such as via Service accounts which can be used by Google API client libraries to connect to Google Cloud Storage.
Related
I am newbie at cloud servers and I've opened a google cloud storage to host image files. I've verified my domain and configured it, to view images via my domain. The problem is, same file is both accessible via my domain example.com/images/tiny.png and also via storage.googleapis.com/example.com/images/tiny.png Is there any solution to disable access via storage.googleapis.com and use only my domain?
Google Cloud Platform Support Version:
NOTE: This is the reply from Google Cloud Platform Support when contacted via email...
I understand that you have set up a domain name for one of your Cloud Storage buckets and you want to make sure only URLs starting with your domain name have access to this bucket.
I am afraid that this is not possible because of how Cloud Storage permission works.
Making a Cloud Storage bucket publicly readable also gives each of its files a public link. And currently this public link can’t be disabled.
A workaround would be implement a proxy program and running it on a Compute Engine virtual machine. This VM will need a static external IP so that you can map your domain to it. The proxy program will be in charged of returning the requested file from a predefined Cloud Storage bucket while the bucket keeps to be inaccessible to the public.
You may find these documents helpful if you are interested in this workaround:
1. Quick start to set up a Linux VM (1).
2. Python API for accessing Cloud Storage files (2).
3. How to download service account keys to grant a program access to a set of services (3).
4. Pricing calculator for getting a picture on how much a VM may cost (4).
(1) https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/quickstart-linux
(2) https://pypi.org/project/google-cloud-storage/
(3) https://cloud.google.com/iam/docs/creating-managing-service-account-keys
(4) https://cloud.google.com/products/calculator/
My Version:
It seems the solution to this question is really a simple, just FUSE Google Cloud Storage with VM Instance.
After FUSE private files from GCS can be accessed through VM's IP address. It made Google Cloud Storage Bucket act like a directory.
The detailed documentation about how to setup FUSE in Google Cloud is here.
There is but it requires you to do more work.
Your current solution works because you've made access to the GCS bucket (example.com), public and then you're DNS aliasing from your domain.
An alternative approach would be for you to limit access to the GCS bucket to one (possibly several) accounts and then run a web-server that uses one of the accounts to access your image files. You could then also either permit access to your web-server to anyone or also limit access to it.
More work for you (and possibly cost) but more control.
I recently created a VM, but mistakenly gave the default service account Storage: Read Only permissions instead of the intended Read Write under "Identity & API access", so GCS write operations from the VM are now failing.
I realized my mistake, so following the advice in this answer, I stopped the VM, changed the scope to Read Write and started the VM. However, when I SSH in, I'm still getting 403 errors when trying to create buckets.
$ gsutil mb gs://some-random-bucket
Creating gs://some-random-bucket/...
AccessDeniedException: 403 Insufficient OAuth2 scope to perform this operation.
Acceptable scopes: https://www.googleapis.com/auth/cloud-platform
How can I fix this? I'm using the default service account, and don't have the IAM permissions to be able to create new ones.
$ gcloud auth list
Credentialed Accounts
ACTIVE ACCOUNT
* (projectnum)-compute#developer.gserviceaccount.com
I will suggest you to try add the scope "cloud-platform" to the instance by running the gcloud command below
gcloud alpha compute instances set-scopes INSTANCE_NAME [--zone=ZONE]
[--scopes=[SCOPE,…] [--service-account=SERVICE_ACCOUNT
As a scopes put "https://www.googleapis.com/auth/cloud-platform" since it give Full access to all Google Cloud Platform resources.
Here is gcloud documentation
Try creating the Google Cloud Storage bucket with your user account.
Type gcloud auth login and access the link you are provided, once there, copy the code and paste it into the command line.
Then do gsutil mb gs://bucket-name.
The security model has 2 things at play, API Scopes and IAM permissions. Access is determined by the AND of them. So you need an acceptable scope and enough IAM privileges in order to do whatever action.
API Scopes are bound to the credentials. They are represented by a URL like, https://www.googleapis.com/auth/cloud-platform.
IAM permissions are bound to the identity. These are setup in the Cloud Console's IAM & admin > IAM section.
This means you can have 2 VMs with the default service account but both have different levels of access.
For simplicity you generally want to just set the IAM permissions and use the cloud-platform API auth scope.
To check if you have this setup go to the VM in cloud console and you'll see something like:
Cloud API access scopes
Allow full access to all Cloud APIs
When you SSH into the VM by default gcloud will be logged in as the service account on the VM. I'd discourage logging in as yourself otherwise you more or less break gcloud's configuration to read the default service account.
Once you have this setup you should be able to use gsutil properly.
Trying to get Google Cloud Storage working on my app. I successfully saved an image to a bucket, but when trying to retrieve the image, I receive this error:
GCS Storage (615.3ms) Generated URL for file at key: 9A95rZATRKNpGbMNDbu7RqJx ()
Completed 500 Internal Server Error in 618ms (ActiveRecord: 0.2ms)
Google::Cloud::Storage::SignedUrlUnavailable (Google::Cloud::Storage::SignedUrlUnavailable):
Any idea of what's going on? I can't find an explanation for this error in their documentation.
To provide some explanation here...
Google App Engine (as well as Google Compute Engine, Kubernetes Engine, and Cloud Run) provides "ambient" credentials associated with the VM or instance being run, but only in the form of OAuth tokens. For most API calls, this is sufficient and convenient.
However, there are a small number of exceptions, and Google Cloud Storage is one of them. Recent Storage clients (including the google-cloud-storage gem) may require a full service account key to support certain calls that involve signed URLs. This full key is not provided automatically by App Engine (or other hosting environments). You need to provide one yourself. So as a previous answer indicated, if you're using Cloud Storage, you may not be able to depend on the "ambient" credentials. Instead, you should create a service account, download a service account key, and make it available to your app (for example, via the ActiveStorage configs, or by setting the GOOGLE_APPLICATION_CREDENTIALS environment variable).
I was able to figure this out. I had been following Rail's guide on Active Storage with Google Storage Cloud, and was unclear on how to generate my credentials file.
google:
service: GCS
credentials: <%= Rails.root.join("path/to/keyfile.json") %>
project: ""
bucket: ""
Initially, I thought I didn't need a keyfile due to this sentence in Google's Cloud Storage authentication documentation:
If you're running your application on Google App Engine or Google
Compute Engine, the environment already provides a service account's
authentication information, so no further setup is required.
(I am using Google App Engine)
So I commented out the credentials line and started testing. Strangely, I was able to write to Google Cloud Storage without issue. However, when retrieving the image I would receive the 500 server error Google::Cloud::Storage::SignedUrlUnavailable.
I fixed this by generating my private key and adding it to my rails app.
Another possible solution as of google-cloud-storage gem version 1.27 in August 2020 is documented here. My Google::Auth.get_application_default as in the documentation returned an empty object, but using Google::Cloud::Storage::Credentials.default.client instead worked.
If you get Google::Apis::ClientError: badRequest: Request contains an invalid argument response when signing check that you have dash in the project name in the signing URL (i.e projects/-/serviceAccounts explicit project name in the path is deprecated and no longer valid) and that you have "issuer" string correct, as the full email address identifier of the service account not just the service account name.
If you get Google::Apis::ClientError: forbidden: The caller does not have permission verify the roles your Service Account have:
gcloud projects get-iam-policy <project-name>
--filter="bindings.members:<sa_name>"
--flatten="bindings[].members" --format='table(bindings.role)'
=> ROLE
roles/iam.serviceAccountTokenCreator
roles/storage.admin
serviceAccountTokenCreator is required to call the signBlob service, and you need storage.admin to have ownership of the thing you need to sign. I think these are project global rights, I couldn't get it to work with more fine grained permissions unfortunately (i.e one app is admin for a certain Storage bucket)
I have developed a Software in which is configured directories to save files. I run it on Linux. These directories are informed by config file.
I would like to use compute engine nodes because I need to increase its performance. Therefore, I would like to use Google Storage to save these files into a save repository.
In [1] is showed mounting a bucket as file system. I tried it, but no success. I receive authentication error.
Can anyone help me to get success in order to access my bucket by compute engine nodes ?
[1] https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/disks/gcs-buckets
Best regards,
It sounds like you did not start your GCE instance with a service account.
According to the docs you linked, you need to configure a service account or run gcloud auth login to configure your credentials for accessing cloud storage.
If you are trying to set up gcsfuse without running on GCE you will need to use the gcloud auth login approach.
I'm trying to use Cloud SQL from my VM instance.
When creating the VM Instance I activated Cloud SQL Option for it.
The Cloud SQL instance authorizes my Compute Engine Project to access it.
At first I was expecting to have some tools like google_sql.sh installed on my VM since I had activated Cloud SQL on it but no :-/
In Cloud SQL docs it says that I should copy my local access token to my VM Instance.
My local machine is Mac OSX so the tokens are stored in :
~user/Library/Preferences/com.google.cloud.plist
but on my Linux VM it's stored in:
~user/.java/.userPrefs/com/google/cloud/sqlservice/oauth2/prefs.xml.
Do I have to create a prefs.xml and copy it on my VM? (but I guess the XML schema is not the same between com.google.cloud.plist and prefs.xml?)
Does someone have perfs.xml example I could use as a template (unless schema is exactly the same as com.google.cloud.plist which I doubt)?
Thanks all for your help.
The simplest thing is actually to include service account scopes when you create your instance. This page in the compute engine docs describes how to do it. This maintains an access token in the compute engine instance's metadata server which the Cloud SQL tools can then access when they need to authenticate. A similar technique works for cloud storage and other products.