Achieve more with new Google Compute Engine command-line tool in Google Cloud SDK

A couple of months ago, we shared some tips and tricks about bringing the power of Google Cloud Platform to your command-line using Google Cloud SDK and gcloud. Today we are announcing that gcloud family of command-line tools is being joined by gcloud compute, a new command-line interface for Google Compute Engine.



Here are some guiding principles that we focused on while developing this new command-line tool. We certainly hope it will help you to be more productive with Google Compute Engine!



Great Windows support out-of-the-box

If you’re running on Windows, download and launch our new Google Cloud SDK installer. Once the installer completes, you should have gcloud compute available on your system.



Using gcloud compute you can easily connect to your VM instances, manage files and running processes on native Windows installations, as well as on Linux and Mac machines without any extra effort. For example, to SSH into your VM, simply run gcloud compute ssh INSTANCE_NAME --zone=us-central1-a.





To execute a process remotely on your VM, add “--command“ flag, e.g. gcloud compute ssh INSTANCE_NAME --command="ps aux" --zone=us-central1-a.



To copy files to and from your instances, use copy-files command:

gcloud compute copy-files instance-1:file-1 instance-2:file-2 ... local-directory --zone=us-central1-a



gcloud compute copy-files file-1 file-2 ... instance:remote-directory --zone=us-central1-a



Finally, if you want to use SSH-based programs, like ssh or scp directly, run gcloud compute config-ssh, which will populate your per-user SSH configuration file with “Host” entries from each instance.



Improved scripting support

You can easily combine individual commands into actions which would require tens of button clicks in the graphical interface, or tens of lines when programming directly against APIs. Here is a simple example.



Run the following command to list all of your virtual machine instances:

gcloud compute instances list



Similarly, to delete a particular VM instance (say named my-old-vm), run the following command:

gcloud compute instances delete my-old-vm



Now, combine the previous two commands to delete all your VMs in us-central1-b zone:

gcloud compute instances delete $(gcloud compute instances list --zone=us-central1-b)



Integrated documentation and command-line help

If you want to read a summary of a particular command’s usage, simply append -h to any command (for example, gcloud compute instances list -h). Similarly, append --help to any command to see its detailed man page entry on Linux or Mac. The detailed command-line reference for all platforms is also available on Cloud SDK’s documentation page.



Flexible output formatting

The gcloud compute instances list example above prints detailed information about VM instances in YAML format by default. If you want to get the same data in JSON or in condensed, human-readable text formats (for example, to send it over the wire or to import it in a spreadsheet), simply pass the “--format=json“ or “--format=text“ flag to any list operation in gcloud compute:



gcloud compute firewall-rules list --format=text or

gcloud compute zones list --format=json



Furthermore, you could use regular expressions via --regexp to get information only about objects with specific names. For example, to return information about VM instances with names my-instance-1, my-instance-2, my-instance-3, run the following command:

gcloud compute instances list --regexp my-instance-.*



Finally, if you care just about certain fields in the output, you can select them by passing “--fields“ flag. For example, to see the disks attached to all your instances and their modes, run:

gcloud compute instances list --fields name disks[].source disks[].mode



Command suggestion and autocompletion

While gcloud command-line tools are great for scripting, they’re also comfortable for humans to use. On Linux and Mac, all gcloud commands can be autocompleted by pressing (e.g. type gcloud compute fi and press to have it expanded to gcloud compute firewall-rules). Similarly, you can type gcloud compute firewall-rules and press twice to see the operations which you can perform with firewall-rules. Also, if you mistype a command, gcloud will suggest a nearest match.