Linking Google Cloud Storage as a source

You can sync and query files and folders from Google Cloud Storage (GCS) in PostHog by setting up a link.

Step 1: Creating a bucket in GCS

1. Go to your Google Cloud console.
2. Create a bucket in GCS.
   • For location, we recommend choosing us-east1 for US Cloud or europe-west3 for EU Cloud to keep them close to our servers.
   • For storage class, choose Standard.
   • For access control, choose Uniform.
3. Upload your data to the bucket. This can be as simple as a .csv file like this:

name,age
John,30
Jane,25

Step 2: Set up a service account

GCS uses service accounts to control access to resources. We need one to connect to GCS. To create one:

1. Go to the service accounts page in the GCS console and click Create service account.
2. Fill in the account name and ID and click Create and continue.
3. Grant the account the Storage Object User role.
4. Click Done.

Step 3: Set up access keys.

1. Go to the cloud storage settings page and click the Interoperability tab.
2. Click Create a key for another service account.
3. Select the service account you created in step 2 and click create key.
4. Copy both the access key and secret. Save them some place safe because you'll need to regenerate them if you lose them.

Step 4: Create the table in PostHog

1. Go to the Data pipeline page and the sources tab in PostHog
2. Click New source. Under self managed, look for Google Cloud Storage and click Link
3. Fill the table name, then use the data from GCS:
   • For files URL pattern, use https://storage.googleapis.com/ followed by your bucket and file or folder name like https://storage.googleapis.com/posthog-warehouse/july12_google_ads_fixed.csv. You can also use * to query multiple files.
   • Choose the correct file format
   • For access key, use your Access Key ID
   • For secret key, use your Secret Access Key
4. Click Next

Step 5: Query the table

Once it is done syncing, you can now query your new table using the table name.