Installing the Cloud SDK for Cloud Bigtable

As an alternative to the Google Cloud Platform Console, you can use the Cloud SDK and the cbt command-line tool to manage your Cloud Bigtable instances from the command line.

Installing the tools

To install the command-line tools:

1. Install the Cloud SDK, which provides the gcloud command-line tool.

   If you've already installed the Cloud SDK, run the following command to make sure it's up to date:

   gcloud components update
   

2. Install or update the beta component of the Cloud SDK, along with the cbt tool:

   gcloud components install beta cbt
   

3. Set a default project for the gcloud tool, replacing PROJECT_ID with the project where your Cloud Bigtable instances are located:

   gcloud config set project PROJECT_ID
   

You can now use the gcloud and cbt tools for Cloud Bigtable.

Getting help

For the gcloud tool, each command for working with Cloud Bigtable begins with gcloud beta bigtable. To get help for each command, see the reference documentation, or use the gcloud tool itself to get help:

gcloud beta bigtable instances --help  # help for all commands
gcloud beta bigtable instances create --help  # help for the `create` command

For the cbt tool, get help from the reference documentation, or use the cbt tool itself to get help:

cbt help  # view a list of commands and help for all commands
cbt help createtable  # help for the `createtable` command

What's next

• Learn how to create a Cloud Bigtable instance.
• Find out how to view and update existing Cloud Bigtable instances.
• Learn how to delete a Cloud Bigtable instance.
• See other maintenance tasks you can perform with the cbt tool.