gcloud (Google Cloud CLI)

What it is

Google Cloud's CLI: gcloud (projects, compute, IAM, GKE), bundled with gsutil (Cloud Storage) and bq (BigQuery).

Install

Official apt repo (Debian/Ubuntu):

sudo apt install apt-transport-https ca-certificates gnupg curl
curl -fsSL https://packages.cloud.google.com/apt/doc/apt-key.gpg \
  | sudo gpg --dearmor -o /usr/share/keyrings/cloud.google.gpg
echo "deb [signed-by=/usr/share/keyrings/cloud.google.gpg] https://packages.cloud.google.com/apt cloud-sdk main" \
  | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/google-cloud-sdk.list
sudo apt update && sudo apt install google-cloud-cli

Alternative: the versioned tarballs from the install docs (linux-x86_64 or linux-arm); extract and run ./google-cloud-sdk/install.sh.

Authenticate

gcloud auth login            # browser OAuth, user account
gcloud config set project <project-id>
gcloud auth application-default login   # for SDKs/tools using ADC

Credentials land in ~/.config/gcloud/. For service accounts, store the JSON key in Vaultwarden (https://vault.portugalfuturista.org) and activate with:

gcloud auth activate-service-account --key-file=<path> --project=<project-id>

Configure for this environment

Named configurations keep personal/lab projects apart:

gcloud config configurations create lab
gcloud config set project <lab-project-id>
gcloud config configurations list
gcloud config configurations activate lab

Self-hosted equivalent

There is no real self-hosted GCP. Dev stand-ins we use instead:

Firebase Emulator Suite (firebase emulators:start, via npm i -g firebase-tools) for Firestore/Auth/Functions.
fake-gcs-server for Cloud Storage: docker run -p 4443:4443 fsouza/fake-gcs-server -scheme http, then STORAGE_EMULATOR_HOST=http://localhost:4443 for client libraries.
For plain object storage, prefer MinIO (http://192.168.0.40:9000) — S3-compatible and already on the LAN.

Aurélio integration

The cli-gcloud skill wraps gcloud/gsutil for project and storage ops. Connector registry id: google-cloud.

Verify

gcloud --version
# Google Cloud SDK x.y.z
gcloud auth list
#        Credentialed Accounts
# ACTIVE  ACCOUNT
# *       you@example.com
gcloud config list project
# [core]
# project = <project-id>

Troubleshooting

Old SDK from distro packages — only use the Google apt repo above; distro google-cloud-sdk packages are frequently broken/stale.
gcloud auth login opens no browser — run gcloud auth login --no-browser and paste the code back.
ADC errors in scripts — you authenticated gcloud but not application-default credentials; run gcloud auth application-default login.
Wrong project billed — check gcloud config get-value project before provisioning; use named configurations.

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