Installing the Cloud SDK for Bigtable

As an alternative to the Google Cloud 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 Bigtable instances are located:

    gcloud config set project PROJECT_ID

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

Getting help

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

gcloud bigtable clusters --help  # help for all commands
gcloud bigtable clusters 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