This page contains tips that might be useful when you use the gcloud
command-line tool to manage your Compute Engine resources. For a
complete list of all available gcloud compute flags and
commands, you can use the built-in command help (--help) or the published
reference documentation, or
the gcloud core documentation.
Before you begin
- If you want to use the command-line examples in this guide:
- Install or update to the latest version of the gcloud command-line tool.
- Set a default region and zone.
Fetching information about resources
You can fetch information about Compute Engine resources in two ways:
using
the list command to return a list of resources and using the describe
command to return details about one specific resource.
Fetching resources with list commands
The list commands are designed to return a human-readable table of the
most relevant data for the requested resources. You can optionally
filter your results to return a shorter
list with more relevant results.
- Regular expression filtering for names
- You can use RE2 syntax to match resource names (for example, instance or disk names). Refer to the gcloud compute instances list.
- Command Flags
--limitThe maximum number of results to return. This flag is particularly useful when used with the
--sort-byflag described in the Fetching resources with describe commands section.--sort-by SORT_BYA field to sort by, if applicable. To perform a descending-order sort, prefix the value with a tilde ("~").
Fetching resources with describe commands
The describe commands are designed for displaying data about one resource. You
must provide the name of the resource in the describe command. If you can't
remember the resource name, you can run a list command to get a list of
resources. For example, the following two commands illustrate a scenario when
you can list images to get an image name and its associated project so that you
can provide these as inputs to a describe command:
gcloud compute images list
NAME PROJECT FAMILY DEPRECATED STATUS ... centos-7-v20170620 centos-cloud centos-7 READY ... debian-9-stretch-v20170619 debian-cloud debian-9 READY ...
gcloud compute images describe debian-9-stretch-v20170619 --project debian-cloud
The default output from describe commands is YAML format, but you can use
the --format flag to choose between JSON, YAML, and text output formats.
JSON formatted output can be useful if you are parsing the output, while text
formatted output puts each property on a separate line.
gcloud compute regions describe us-central1 --format json
{
"creationTimestamp": "2013-09-06T10:36:54.847-07:00",
"description": "us-central1",
"id": "6837843067389011605",
"kind": "compute#region",
"name": "us-central1",
...
"status": "UP",
"zones": [
"https://compute.googleapis.com/compute/v1/projects/myproject/zones/us-central1-a",
"https://compute.googleapis.com/compute/v1/projects/myproject/zones/us-central1-b",
"https://compute.googleapis.com/compute/v1/projects/myproject/zones/us-central1-f"
]
}
Examples
Examples of list commands
When you list resources, you get an easy-to-read table of
summary data. For example, to return summary data about instances in your
project, use the
instances list command:
gcloud compute instances list
NAME ZONE MACHINE_TYPE INTERNAL_IP EXTERNAL_IP STATUS example-instance asia-east1-b n1-standard-1 10.240.95.199 107.167.182.44 RUNNING example-instance2 us-central1-a n1-standard-1 10.240.173.254 23.251.148.121 RUNNING test-instance us-central1-a n1-standard-1 10.240.118.207 23.251.153.172 RUNNING
You can filter results from list commands with regular expressions by
including the --filter flag with a
key ~ value operator. For example, filter the list of instances to include
only the instances with "test" in the instance name:
gcloud compute instances list --filter="name ~ .*test.*"
NAME ZONE MACHINE_TYPE INTERNAL_IP EXTERNAL_IP STATUS test-instance us-central1-a n1-standard-1 10.240.118.207 23.251.153.172 RUNNING
To return a list of zone operations that have a status of DONE and
do not have an httpStatus of 200, apply a zone filter on an
operations list command, then
grep the results:
gcloud compute operations list --filter="zone:(us-central1-a)" | grep DONE | grep 200
NAME HTTP_STATUS TYPE TARGET STATUS operation-1397752585735-4f73fa25b4b58-f0920fd5-254d709f 400 delete us-central1-a/disks/example-instance DONE operation-1398357613036-4f7cc80cb41e0-765bcba6-34bbd040 409 insert us-central1-a/instances/i-1 DONE operation-1398615481237-4f8088aefbe08-cc300dfa-2ce113cf 409 insert us-central1-a/instances/i-2 DONE
To get a list of list of disks in us-central1-a, sorted in descending order by
name (--sort-by ~NAME), use a
disks list command:
gcloud compute disks list --sort-by ~NAME --filter="zone:(us-central1-a)"
In some scenarios, you may want to have the full URI link to the
resource, such as requests where you are passing the output from a list
command to another command or application that takes a list of resource links.
To show full URI resource links, use the --uri flag with a list command.
gcloud compute instances list --uri --filter="name~'^example-.*'"
https://compute.googleapis.com/compute/v1/projects/myproject/zones/us-central1-a/instances/example-instance1 https://compute.googleapis.com/compute/v1/projects/myproject/zones/us-central1-a/instances/example-instance2
To use the previous list command output within a command that deletes
instances, use:
gcloud compute instances delete $(gcloud compute instances list --uri --filter="name~'^example-.*'")
Examples of describe commands
To get details about just one instance, specify the instance, including zone.
For example, to return information about the instance named "example-instance" in
the "asia-east1-b" zone, you can use
instances describe command:
gcloud compute instances describe example-instance --zone asia-east1-b
By default, this returns YAML output. To change the output to JSON or text (one property
per line) use the --format flag. For example, to return text output for the
same instance, use:
gcloud compute instances describe example-instance --zone asia-east1-b --format text
--- canIpForward: False creationTimestamp: 2014-04-19T06:43:04.087-07:00 disks[0].autoDelete: False disks[0].boot: True disks[0].deviceName: example-instance ...
To get details about a specific operation, use the
operations list command
to find the fully qualified URI of the operation:
gcloud compute operations list --filter="zone:(us-central1-a)"
NAME TYPE TARGET HTTP_STATUS STATUS operation-1406155165815-4fee4032850d9-7b78077c-a170c5c0 delete us-central1-a/instances/example-instance 200 DONE operation-1406155180632-4fee4040a67c1-bf581ed8-ab5af2b8 delete us-central1-a/instances/example-instance-2 200 DONE ...
Then use the URI in an
operations describe
command:
gcloud compute operations describe \
operation-1406155165815-4fee4032850d9-7b78077c-a170c5c0 --zone us-central1-a
endTime: '2014-07-23T15:40:02.463-07:00' id: '31755455923038965' insertTime: '2014-07-23T15:39:25.910-07:00' kind: compute#operation name: operation-1406155165815-4fee4032850d9-7b78077c-a170c5c0 operationType: delete progress: 100 ...
The following command gets instance settings in JSON format (--format json).
gcloud compute instances describe example-instance \
--zone us-central1-a
--format json
{
...
"name": "example-instance",
"networkInterfaces": [
{
"accessConfigs": [
{
"kind": "compute#accessConfig",
"name": "external-nat",
"natIP": "107.167.187.66",
"type": "ONE_TO_ONE_NAT"
}
],
"name": "nic0",
"network": "https://compute.googleapis.com/compute/v1/projects/myproject/global/networks/default",
"networkIP": "10.240.111.51"
}
],
...
"status": "RUNNING"
...
}
Checking which user you are authorized as
Use the following command to find out which account you are authorizes as, use:
gcloud auth list
Revoking a refresh token
To revoke the credentials for an account on the machine where you are using the Cloud SDK, use:
gcloud auth revoke
This will force you to use re-authenticate using gcloud init.
You can also revoke permission for the Cloud SDK to access your resources. You might do this, if your refresh tokens are compromised, for example. To revoke permission for the Cloud SDK:
- Log into your Google Account page.
- Click Security and then click View all in the Account permissions section.
- Select Google Cloud SDK and click Revoke Access.
Rebooting an instance
To reset an instance named "example-instance" in the "us-central1-a" zone, use the
instances reset
command:
gcloud compute instances reset example-instance --zone us-central1-a
For information about the implications of a reset, read the Reset an instance documentation.