Google Cloud Storage + Python : Any way to list obj in certain folder in GCS?

Question

I'm going to write a Python program to check if a file is in certain folder of my Google Cloud Storage, the basic idea is to get the list of all objects in a folder, a file name list, then check if the file abc.txt is in the file name list.

Now the problem is, it looks Google only provide the one way to get obj list, which is uri.get_bucket(), see below code which is from https://developers.google.com/storage/docs/gspythonlibrary#listing-objects

uri = boto.storage_uri(DOGS_BUCKET, GOOGLE_STORAGE)
for obj in uri.get_bucket():
    print '%s://%s/%s' % (uri.scheme, uri.bucket_name, obj.name)
    print '  "%s"' % obj.get_contents_as_string()

The defect of uri.get_bucket() is, it looks it is getting all of the object first, this is what I don't want, I just need get the obj name list of particular folder(e.g gs//mybucket/abc/myfolder) , which should be much quickly.

Could someone help answer? Appreciate every answer!

Answer 1

Update: the below is true for the older "Google API Client Libraries" for Python, but if you're not using that client, prefer the newer "Google Cloud Client Library" for Python ( https://googleapis.dev/python/storage/latest/index.html ). For the newer library, the equivalent to the below code is:

from google.cloud import storage

client = storage.Client()
for blob in client.list_blobs('bucketname', prefix='abc/myfolder'):
  print(str(blob))

Answer for older client follows.

You may find it easier to work with the JSON API, which has a full-featured Python client. It has a function for listing objects that takes a prefix parameter, which you could use to check for a certain directory and its children in this manner:

from apiclient import discovery

# Auth goes here if necessary. Create authorized http object...
client = discovery.build('storage', 'v1') # add http=whatever param if auth
request = client.objects().list(
    bucket="mybucket",
    prefix="abc/myfolder")
while request is not None:
  response = request.execute()
  print json.dumps(response, indent=2)
  request = request.list_next(request, response)

Fuller documentation of the list call is here: https://developers.google.com/storage/docs/json_api/v1/objects/list

And the Google Python API client is documented here: https://code.google.com/p/google-api-python-client/