Cannot get or create group

If you see this error:

SREGISTRY_CLIENT=google-compute sregistry shell
...
ERROR Cannot get or create awesome-group-pancakes-universe

Why might this happen?

If you get this error, it’s likely that you don’t have the correct permission to create a storage bucket, or to access one that exists. To get to the bottom of the error, we will walk through the commands to trigger (and not catch it with the message above.)

Step 1: export needed variables

First, make sure that you have all these environment variables exported:

export GOOGLE_CLOUD_PROJECT="..."
export GOOGLE_APPLICATION_CREDENTIALS="..."

# You need to have storage admin permissions on this project
export SREGISTRY_GOOGLE_PROJECT="..."
export SREGISTRY_GOOGLE_STORAGE_BUCKET="..."
export SREGISTRY_CLIENT=google-compute

Step 2: Open a Python shell

Now you can open up a python shell. I prefer ipython because of the colors and autocompletion :) If you have sregistry installed, you will have these dependencies

# ipython
from googleapiclient.discovery import build as discovery_build
from oauth2client.client import GoogleCredentials
from google.cloud import storage
import os

bucket_name = os.environ['SREGISTRY_GOOGLE_STORAGE_BUCKET']

The next function to load credentials is only going to work given that you’ve exported GOOGLE_APPLICATION_CREDENTIALS.

creds = GoogleCredentials.get_application_default()

As a reminder, these are the Default Application Credentials that you download from the web interface, a json file.

Step 3. Create clients

Now we want to create handles for interactions with storage and compute. Creating these all here isn’t totally necessary, but in the case that some error triggers, let’s do it anyway to see that. I actually think this step doesn’t interact with the API, so you shouldn’t see an error unless one of Google’s “sanity checks” doesn’t pass.

# We are initializing the last two just to make sure no errors trigger
bucket_service = storage.Client()
storage_service = discovery_build('storage', 'v1', credentials=creds)
compute_service = discovery_build('compute', 'v1', credentials=creds) 

Step 4. Trigger the error

Here is where the error is going to trigger.

bucket = bucket_service.get_bucket(bucket_name)

When I run this command (with correct permissions, and an existing bucket) I get back a bucket.

# bucket
# <Bucket: sregistry-vanessa>

But if you are hitting the error above, you likely aren’t going to get this message. Another derivation of this error (which wouldn’t be properly caught) is if the bucket doesn’t exist, but you don’t have permission to create it. Here is how to trigger that error (google.cloud.exceptions.NotFound)

bucket = bucket_service.create_bucket(bucket_name)

Either you will get an obvious message (something akin to telling you that you don’t have correct permissions for an operation) or in the case that you don’t understand the error and need help, please open an issue!