Google Cloud Storage Search Files

Question

I'm developing an application that will serve a lot of file. Lets say it's a car company. Each car has a folder with documents/files for that car. These files are uploaded into categories, represented as "folders" in GStorage. 2 files for 2 different cars could look like this:

car1/receipt/2016-02-02_payment.pdf
car1/pictures/tires.png

car2/receipt/2016-01-02_payment.pdf

Lets say I want to list all receipts in my application. How would I do this? Since the search capabilities in Google Cloud Storage is very limited my current proposed solution is to have a mirrored database table with all of the files in it, when i want to access the files i generate the URL for the user. It would be very nice is GStorage had a way to search for */ files.

Answer 1

In your example, you could achieve this using wildcards with gsutil to list your bucket contents:

gsutil ls gs://your-bucket/car*/receipt

Answer 2

gsutil supports * and ? wildcards only for files. To include folders in the wildcard target you need to double the * or ? sign. For instance, gsutil ls gs:///**.txt will list all the text files in all subdirectories. The wildcard page offers more details.