Possibility to extend GCS Blob/ BlobStats to also contain `metadata`?

[cwerner]

Hi 👋

I just discovered your lib and as a big fan of pathlib I'm thrilled! I have one question though. GCS blobs have a metadata field that can contain arbitrary key/ value pairs (see https://cloud.google.com/storage/docs/viewing-editing-metadata#edit). I use them to label content in buckets and easily filter on these labels (i.e.flag invalid data, subsequent removal of all invalid data etc.)...
I thought about modifying the Blob, BlobStats classes, but maybe this feature would be useful enough to be included in the lib? If not: what would be the easiest way to achieve this?

Cheers,
C

[justindujardin]

This would be a nice addition. It looks like all our providers support setting metadata on blobs:

Client	Docs
GCS	https://cloud.google.com/storage/docs/viewing-editing-metadata#edit
S3	https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/userguide/UsingMetadata.html
Azure	https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/rest/api/storageservices/set-blob-metadata?tabs=microsoft-entra-id

The only snag I see is the local-only developer mode, where we must write to the filesystem. I don't think Windows provides a way to set metadata on files directly, so we'd need to store it as sibling hidden files, or something similar.

what would be the easiest way to achieve this?

First you'd want to extend pathy with a new method similar to the ls method. Then you'd add the new method/s to BucketClient and update the gcs.py, s3.py and azure.py to implement the appropriate calls and methods.