How to configure a Validation Result store in GCS¶
By default, Validations are stored in JSON format in the uncommitted/validations/
subdirectory of your great_expectations/
folder. Since Validations may include examples of data (which could be sensitive or regulated) they should not be committed to a source control system. This guide will help you configure a new storage location for Validations in a Google Cloud Storage (GCS) bucket.
Prerequisites: This how-to guide assumes that you have already:
Configured a Data Context.
Configured an Expectations Suite.
Configured a Checkpoint.
Configured a Google Cloud Platform (GCP) service account with credentials that can access the appropriate GCP resources, which include Storage Objects.
Identified the GCP project, GCS bucket, and prefix where Validations will be stored.
Steps¶
Configure your GCP credentials
Check that your environment is configured with the appropriate authentication credentials needed to connect to the GCS bucket where Validations will be stored.
The Google Cloud Platform documentation describes how to verify your authentication for the Google Cloud API, which includes:
Creating a Google Cloud Platform (GCP) service account,
Setting the
GOOGLE_APPLICATION_CREDENTIALS
environment variable,Verifying authentication by running a simple Google Cloud Storage client library script.
Identify your Data Context Validations Store
In your
great_expectations.yml
, look for the following lines. The configuration tells Great Expectations to look for Validations in a store calledvalidations_store
. Thebase_directory
forvalidations_store
is set touncommitted/validations/
by default.validations_store_name: validations_store stores: validations_store: class_name: ValidationsStore store_backend: class_name: TupleFilesystemStoreBackend base_directory: uncommitted/validations/
Update your configuration file to include a new store for Validations on GCS
In our case, the name is set to
validations_GCS_store
, but it can be any name you like. We also need to make some changes to thestore_backend
settings. Theclass_name
will be set toTupleGCSStoreBackend
,project
will be set to your GCP project,bucket
will be set to the address of your GCS bucket, andprefix
will be set to the folder on GCS where Validation files will be located.Warning
If you are also storing Expectations in GCS or DataDocs in GCS, please ensure that the
prefix
values are disjoint and one is not a substring of the other.expectations_store_name: validations_GCS_store stores: validations_GCS_store: class_name: ValidationsStore store_backend: class_name: TupleGCSStoreBackend project: '<your_GCP_project_name>' bucket: '<your_GCS_bucket_name>' prefix: '<your_GCS_folder_name>'
Copy existing Validation results to the GCS bucket. (This step is optional).
One way to copy Validations into GCS is by using the
gsutil cp
command, which is part of the Google Cloud SDK. In the example below, two Validation results,Validation1
andValidation2
are copied to the GCS bucket. Information on other ways to copy Validation results, like the Cloud Storage browser in the Google Cloud Console, can be found in the Documentation for Google Cloud.gsutil cp uncommitted/validations/Validation1.json gs://'<your_GCS_bucket_name>'/'<your_GCS_folder_name>' gsutil cp uncommitted/validations/Validation2.json gs://'<your_GCS_bucket_name>'/'<your_GCS_folder_name>' Operation completed over 2 objects/58.8 KiB.
Confirm that the new Validations store has been added by running
great_expectations store list
.Notice the output contains two Validation stores: the original
validations_store
on the local filesystem and thevalidations_GCS_store
we just configured. This is ok, since Great Expectations will look for Validations in GCS as long as we set thevalidations_store_name
variable tovalidations_GCS_store
, and the config forvalidations_store
can be removed if you would like.great_expectations store list - name: validations_store class_name: ValidationsStore store_backend: class_name: TupleFilesystemStoreBackend base_directory: uncommitted/validations/ - name: validations_GCS_store class_name: ValidationsStore store_backend: class_name: TupleGCSStoreBackend project: '<your_GCP_project_name>' bucket: '<your_GCS_bucket_name>' prefix: '<your_GCS_folder_name>'
Confirm that the Validations store has been correctly configured.
Run a Checkpoint to store results in the new Validations store on GCS then visualize the results by re-building Data Docs.
If it would be useful to you, please comment with a +1 and feel free to add any suggestions or questions below. Also, please reach out to us on Slack if you would like to learn more, or have any questions.