GCSFS

2026.3.0 · active · verified Sat Mar 28

GCSFS provides a Pythonic file-system interface to Google Cloud Storage, allowing seamless interaction with GCS as if it were a local file system. The current version is 2026.3.0, and it follows a regular release cadence with updates approximately every few months.

Warnings

breaking Default Filesystem Implementation Change: gcsfs now uses ExtendedFileSystem as the default entry point for all bucket types to support specialized storage buckets like Hierarchical Namespace (HNS) out-of-box. This change may affect existing workflows that rely on the previous default implementation.
Fix: If you experience unexpected behavior due to this change, you can revert to the previous implementation by setting the environment variable GCSFS_EXPERIMENTAL_ZB_HNS_SUPPORT=false before importing gcsfs.
gotcha FUSE functionality is experimental and may change. It is not recommended for production use, and data loss could occur if not used cautiously.
Fix: Use FUSE functionality with caution and ensure data is backed up before performing operations.

Install

pip install gcsfs Install via pip
conda install -c conda-forge gcsfs Install via conda

Imports

GCSFileSystem
```
from gcsfs import GCSFileSystem
```
Ensure to import GCSFileSystem from gcsfs to interact with Google Cloud Storage.

Quickstart

This script demonstrates how to initialize a GCSFileSystem instance, list files in a GCS bucket, and read a file from GCS.

import gcsfs

# Initialize the GCSFileSystem
fs = gcsfs.GCSFileSystem(project='your-project-id')

# List files in a bucket
print(fs.ls('your-bucket-name'))

# Read a file
with fs.open('your-bucket-name/your-file.txt', 'rb') as f:
    print(f.read())

view raw JSON →