We use google cloud storage to store .parquet files as part of our dataprocessing. Insert File Bytes into Firebase Cloud Storage with Put Bytes We often want to load a .parquet file into memory, to be read directly into a pandas Dataframe without downloading it on disk.
The code below does the trick. My question is: would it be useful to include a download_as_buffer method in storage.blob?
When running on Google Cloud Platform, no action needs to be taken to authenticate. Otherwise, the simplest way of authenticating your API calls is to download a service account JSON file then set the GOOGLE_APPLICATION_CREDENTIALS environment variable to refer to it. The credentials will automatically be used to authenticate. See the Getting Started With Authentication guide for more details.
Insert File Bytes into Firebase Cloud Storage with Put Bytes
Without using the cloud, it can be difficult to develop and manage a server that lets users upload image files, especially at high scale. You have to queue requests to the process responsible for uploading the files to control the flow rate, and you have to prevent the system from going down due to request overload. You also need to set appropriate resource limits for finite resources (such as RAM) of each server that’s involved.
Things are slightly easier with digital files. Sure, the volume of digital assets produced by individuals and businesses is going through the roof, and everybody seems to be on the lookout for convenient data storage. Yet, the professed data-geddon still seems very unlikely — with so many cloud storage services on the market.
When you perform a simple upload, basic metadata is created and some attributes are inferred from the file, such as the MIME type or modifiedTime. You can use a simple upload in cases where you have small files and file metadata isn’t important.
Robust Operations
Larger upload and download operations can take time, especially for users of weaker internet connections. If network connection fails mid-operation, your operation will continue where it previously stopped.
Strong Security
You can configure security rules to only allow operations to be performed under certain conditions which you can also integrate with Firebase Authentication.
High Scalability
When your app starts going viral and more operations are being conducted, your storage can easily scale up to handle wider audiences… with a bit of money of course. You can’t get everything free.
Integrating Cloud Storage into your App
To use Firebase Cloud Storage, you’ll have to get an instance of Firebase Storage , get a reference which points to a location in the online storage bucket, then from there you can perform upload and download operations.
implementation ‘com.google.firebase:firebase-storage:19.1.0’
First, add this dependency to your app-level build.gradle file.
Getting our Reference
First, get an instance of Firebase Storage.
FirebaseStorage storage = FirebaseStorage.getInstance();
Next, just like with the Realtime Database or Firestore, we’ll get a reference to the root of our storage directory.
StorageReference rootRef = storage.getReference();
Then just like in the databases, you can go lower in the tree with
StorageReference myRef = rootRef.child(“images/myimagedirectory”)
Extra Navigation
As with the databases again, you have the methods getParent and getRoot for up navigation.
Uploading Files to your Storage Reference
So far, we’ve treated our references like directories. With storage however, unlike the Firebase Databases, the references can point to a file’s location as well. I’ll show you what I mean.
StorageReference mountainsRef = storageRef.child(“mountains.jpg”);
When we upload a file to this ref, regardless of its original filename, it will be uploaded to the cloud storage as images/myimagedirectory/mountains.jpg. If we upload another file to this same reference, the new file will override the previously uploaded file.
Now that we have our file reference, we’ll now look at different ways to upload a file into this reference.
putBytes()
This method is the simplest way to upload a file that takes in a byte[] and returns an UploadTask which you can use to manage and monitor the status of the upload.
During the 2016 Google I/O conference, Firebase was reintroduced to the developer community as a major tool for providing quick back-end support for web pages and mobile applications. This tutorial will introduce you to the file storage and retrieval functionality available for your Android apps.
To learn more about Firebase’s real-time database, analytics, crash reporting and authentication, check out some of our other tutorials here on Envato Tuts+.
Authentication Setup
For the sake of brevity, we’ll skip over the general setup process for Firebase in your Android app and the Firebase console. If this is your first time trying Firebase in an app, I suggest first checking out Ashraff Hathibelagal’s article Getting Started With Firebase for Android.
Before you can begin using Firebase Storage, you’ll need to either make sure your user is authenticated, or change the authentication requirement rules in the Firebase Console to allow unauthenticated users to access and upload files. To keep things simple, we’ll do the latter. Let’s start by going into the Storage section of Firebase by selecting Storage in the left navigation column.
Now any user of your app should be able to upload or download files from your Firebase back-end. While this is not ideal for a production environment, it will make learning about Firebase Storage a lot easier without having to dig into authentication code.
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Manually Uploading Files
While being able to upload files from an app is great, sometimes you’ll simply want to store files somewhere that can be easily accessed and pulled down into your app. This is where being able to manually upload files from the Firebase Console comes into play. Under the Files tab, you’ll see a blue button titled Upload File.
Now that you’ve got a file stored in Firebase, let’s go ahead and pull it down into an app. We’ll use a simple layout in our MainActivity that contains an ImageView with an id of image.
In order to access your Firebase Storage files, you’ll need to first get a reference to the FirebaseStorage object, and then create a StorageReference to your project’s URL and the file that you want to download. You can find your project’s URL at the top of the Files section of Storage in the Firebase Console.
Next, you can create a File object and attempt to load the file you want by calling getFile on your StorageReference with the new File object passed as a parameter. Since this operation happens asynchronously, you can add an OnSuccessListener and OnFailureListener to your call in order to handle either contingency.
Uploading From an Android App
Now that you know how to download files from Firebase, it’s time to work on uploads. As you saw when downloading from Firebase Storage, the processes for each form of your data are fairly similar. Uploading is no different, so we’ll simply dive in to how you can move files from your app into Firebase Storage.
Uploading a Byte Array
As with downloading, you will need to get a reference to the FirebaseStorage object and create a reference to your new file’s storage location as a StorageReference. For this example, we will show ic_launcher.png in our ImageView, and then we’ll upload that as an array of bytes.