Google Cloud Platform for Developers

Creating and using a bucket

Let's go ahead and create our first bucket using gsutil. Because all bucket names must be unique in a global namespace, we need to first generate a bucket name that doesn't exist in any other project. As we covered earlier, for complex systems that generate many bucket names, a preferred mechanism is to incorporate a random component into the bucket's name. For our purposes, a small amount of randomization should suffice.

When interacting with Cloud Storage from most tools, the protocol prefix gs:// is used to denote that a given path resides in Cloud Storage. From within the Cloud Shell, execute the following command to generate a unique bucket name:

export BUCKET_NAME=gs://hello-cloud-storage-$RANDOM

With a unique ...