Our Progress with Google Cloud

It’s been a while and I thought you deserve an update on what’s happening with the project. So here goes:

With the money from Indiegogo, we set off to buy the first and most important thing that we needed it for: Google Cloud Storage for images of lost pets. We set up a free trial account to begin with (then set it up again after it lost our credit card details) and started pulling the resources we’d need together. And one of those resources, according to Google’s own documentation, was a package called google-api-php-client.

I ran the necessary command to install the package and, (drum roll)… it didn’t work. According to the package manager we were using stated “The requested package google-api-php-client could not be found in any version, there may be a typo in the package name.” Weird.

After trying again a couple times, I asked what I was doing wrong on StackOverflow, an online Q&A community for programmers. After a couple days and three people looking for the answer, a user called Fracsi pointed out that the package was, in fact, not called google-api-php-client but instead called google/apiclient.

This package installed fine and we continued work on programming the posting system… until we found that we couldn’t access Google Cloud from our web server because we were still on the free trial.

Not much of a problem. After all, this was what we raised the money for, right? But when we tried to enable billing, it asked us to enter our billing information again, for the third time (I personally find it ironic that a company that has built it’s empire on storing and retrieving information efficiently and reliably could lose it’s customer’s payment information twice in a row).

So that’s where we’re at now.

As soon as we fill out the billing information again (we need our legal guardians to do so as none of the team are over 18), we should be able to get the image upload working, barring no further weird problems in Google’s documentation.

Sorry it’s taking so long. We’re working hard and we hope you won’t lose interest.