3 minute read

Hosting on Google Cloud Storage

Required expertise level : Intermediate

Platform : Any

Last tested and confirmed : January 2022

Google Cloud Storage is object storage service similar to Amazon S3, and it provides the ability to serve static web pages as well.

The main advantage of using Google Cloud Storage to host our static mirror is the ability to serve a fully functional “static” web pages directly using Google Cloud Platform URLs which usually looks like this: https://storage.googleapis.com/[bucketname]

Configure static site hosting on Google Cloud Storage

Creating GCS bucket, and setting permissions

First, you need to create an account on Google Cloud Platform, you will need to create a Google account for this.

Note

While it’s possible to use a pre-existing Google account for this step, it’s better to create a new one just for this purpose.

Here, you’ll need to open Storage from the side bar to access Google Cloud Storage settings page.

Create a new bucket here

Buck name

First step will be choosing your bucket name, bucket names should be unique and you’ll use it to access your static website later.

Region settings

Unless you know what you are doing, there is no need to change anything here.

Storage Class

In most cases it should be Standard.

Access control

We will be handling permissions and access control configurations later on, so we’ll leave it unchanged for now.

Encryption

As this bucket will be publicly available, we don’t need to change anything with Encryption settings.

Now, we can go proceed to the new bucket settings page.

Upload the static website

While you can upload your static website using the web interface, it’s preferred to do that using Google Cloud SDK, specially if you are planning on updating your mirror with new content frequently.

Install Google Cloud SDK Command Line Interface

Installing Google Cloud SDK is pretty straight forward process. Simply, follow the instructions related to your operating system in this guide and you will be good to go.

Upload using Google Cloud SDK CLI

After installing Google Cloud Sdk, you will need to authorize the local client to connect to you Google Cloud account, you can do that by opening your terminal and entering gcloud init

After Successfully logging in to your account, you will be asked to select the project you want to use, if you didn’t create a new project you can do that now using the local CLI.

Now, you can use your local CLI to upload the static mirror to the newly created bucket.

Using your terminal, change directory to the static mirror files location, and enter gsutil rsync -R [local-dir] gs://[bucketname]

Note

Replace [local-dir] with the static mirror directory name and [bucketname] with the bucket name.

Uploading files

Now if you go to your bucket settings page, you will notice the static mirror files are uploaded.

Final step will be setting public permissions to the files so the static mirror will be accessible to public internet, you can do that using the local CLI by entering gsutil iam ch allUsers:objectViewer gs://[bucketname]

Note

Replace [bucketname] with your bucket name.

Now you can access your static mirror using this URL scheme https://storage.googleapis.com/[bucketname]/index.html

Note

Replace [bucketname] with your bucket name.

Updating the static mirror

Updating your static mirror with new content will be as simple as going to the mirror’s local directory on your terminal and executing gsutil rsync -R [local-dir] gs://[bucketname] every time.