CRC32C and Installing crcmod

Overview

Cloud Storage provides a cyclic redundancy check (CRC) header that allows clients to verify the integrity of object contents. For non-composite objects Cloud Storage also provides an MD5 header to allow clients to verify object integrity, but for composite objects only the CRC is available. gsutil automatically performs integrity checks on all uploads and downloads. Additionally, you can use the gsutil hash command to calculate a CRC for any local file.

The CRC variant used by Cloud Storage is called CRC32C (Castagnoli), which is not available in the standard Python distribution. The implementation of CRC32C used by gsutil is provided by a third-party Python module called crcmod.

The crcmod module contains a pure-Python implementation of CRC32C, but using it results in slow checksum computation and subsequently very poor performance. A Python C extension is also provided by crcmod, which requires compiling into a binary module for use. gsutil ships with a precompiled crcmod C extension for macOS; for other platforms, see the installation instructions below.

At the end of each copy operation, the gsutil cp, gsutil mv, and gsutil rsync commands validate that the checksum of the source file/object matches the checksum of the destination file/object. If the checksums do not match, gsutil will delete the invalid copy and print a warning message. This very rarely happens, but if it does, you should retry the operation.

Configuration

To determine if the compiled version of crcmod is available in your Python environment, you can inspect the output of the gsutil version command for the "compiled crcmod" entry:

$ gsutil version -l
...
compiled crcmod: True
...

If your crcmod library is compiled to a native binary, this value will be True. If using the pure-Python version, the value will be False.

To control gsutil's behavior in response to crcmod's status, you can set the check_hashes variable in your boto configuration file. For details on this variable, see the surrounding comments in your boto configuration file. If check_hashes is not present in your configuration file, regenerate the file by running gsutil config with the appropriate -e or -a flag.

Installation

These installation instructions assume that:

  • You have pip installed. Consult the pip installation instructions for details on how to install pip.

  • Your installation of pip can be found in your PATH environment variable. If it cannot, you may need to replace pip3 in the commands below with the full path to the executable.

  • You are installing the crcmod package for use with your system installation of Python, and thus use the sudo command. If installing crcmod for a different Python environment (e.g. in a virtualenv), you should omit sudo from the commands below.

  • You are using a Python 3 version with gsutil. You can determine which Python version gsutil is using by running gsutil version -l and looking for the python version: 2.x.x or python version: 3.x.x line.

CentOS, RHEL, and Fedora

To compile and install crcmod:

yum install gcc python3-devel python3-setuptools redhat-rpm-config
sudo pip3 uninstall crcmod
sudo pip3 install --no-cache-dir -U crcmod

Debian and Ubuntu

To compile and install crcmod:

sudo apt-get install gcc python3-dev python3-setuptools
sudo pip3 uninstall crcmod
sudo pip3 install --no-cache-dir -U crcmod

Enterprise SUSE

To compile and install crcmod when using Enterprise SUSE for SAP 12:

sudo zypper install gcc python-devel
sudo pip uninstall crcmod
sudo pip install --no-cache-dir -U crcmod

To compile and install crcmod when using Enterprise SUSE for SAP 15:

sudo zypper install gcc python3-devel
sudo pip uninstall crcmod
sudo pip install --no-cache-dir -U crcmod

macOS

gsutil distributes a pre-compiled version of crcmod for macOS, so you shouldn't need to compile and install it yourself. If for some reason the pre-compiled version is not being detected, please let the Cloud Storage team know (see gsutil help support).

To compile manually on macOS, you will first need to install Xcode and then run:

pip3 install -U crcmod

Windows

An installer is available for the compiled version of crcmod from the Python Package Index (PyPi) at the following URL:

https://pypi.python.org/pypi/crcmod/1.7

In some cases the installer will incorrectly install to <python_dir>\Lib\site-packages\crcmod

Manually copying the crcmod directory to the correct location should resolve the issue.