Installing the Cloud SDK Docker image

The Cloud SDK Docker Image is essentially Cloud SDK installed on top of a Debian-based OS image.

This allows you to pull your desired version of Cloud SDK as a Docker image from Dockerhub and quickly execute gcloud commands within an isolated, correctly configured container.

The Docker image itself is hosted on both Container Registry and Docker Hub, with the following repository names:

• Container Registry: gcr.io/google.com/cloudsdktool/cloud-sdk.
• Docker Hub: google/cloud-sdk.

Docker image options

The Cloud SDK Docker images comes in three flavors; latest, slim, and alpine. You can specify your preference by using the appropriate tag (after the host repository name):

• :latest, :VERSION: Large (Debian-based) image with additional components pre-installed
• :slim, :VERSION-slim: Smaller (Debian-based) image with no components pre-installed
• :alpine, :VERSION-alpine: Smallest (Alpine-based) image with no additional components installed

Installing a specified Docker image

Note: The following workflow uses the Container Registry image. To use the Docker Hub image instead, replace all instances of gcr.io/google.com/cloudsdktool/cloud-sdk with google/cloud-sdk.

1. To use the image of the latest Cloud SDK release, gcr.io/google.com/cloudsdktool/cloud-sdk:latest, pull it from Container Registry by running the following command:

   docker pull gcr.io/google.com/cloudsdktool/cloud-sdk:latest
   

2. Verify the installation (if you've pulled the latest version) by running:

   docker run gcr.io/google.com/cloudsdktool/cloud-sdk:latest gcloud version
   

   Alternatively, run this command for a specific version, 266.0.0:

   docker run gcr.io/google.com/cloudsdktool/cloud-sdk:266.0.0 gcloud version
   

3. Authenticate with the gcloud command-line tool by running:

   docker run -ti --name gcloud-config gcr.io/google.com/cloudsdktool/cloud-sdk gcloud auth login
   

   Once you've authenticated successfully, credentials are preserved in the volume of the gcloud-config container.

   Note: gcloud-config container now has a volume containing your Google Cloud credentials. Do not use gcloud-config volume in other containers.

4. List compute instances using these credentials to verify by running the container with --volumes-from:

   docker run --rm --volumes-from gcloud-config gcr.io/google.com/cloudsdktool/cloud-sdk gcloud compute instances list --project your_project
   

Installing additional components

By default, the latest images (gcr.io/google.com/cloudsdktool/cloud-sdk:latest and gcr.io/google.com/cloudsdktool/cloud-sdk:VERSION) have all the gcloud components installed.

The gcr.io/google.com/cloudsdktool/cloud-sdk:slim and gcr.io/google.com/cloudsdktool/cloud-sdk:alpine images, however, do not come with additional components pre-installed. You can extend these images by following the instructions below:

Debian-based images

To install an additional component, like google-cloud-sdk-datastore-emulator, run the following:

cd debian_slim/
docker build --build-arg CLOUD_SDK_VERSION=159.0.0 \
    --build-arg INSTALL_COMPONENTS="google-cloud-sdk-datastore-emulator" \
    -t my-cloud-sdk-docker:slim .

Alpine-based images

To install additional components for Alpine-based images, create a Dockerfile that uses the Cloud SDK image as the base image. For example, to add kubectl and app-engine-java components, create a Dockerfile to look like:

FROM gcr.io/google.com/cloudsdktool/cloud-sdk:alpine
RUN apk --update add openjdk7-jre
RUN gcloud components install app-engine-java kubectl

Once done, run the following command:

docker build -t my-cloud-sdk-docker:alpine .

Note: If these additional components require supporting resources, install these dependencies manually.

Installing specific versions of Cloud SDK

To install specific Cloud SDK versions, pass your preferred version in when running the docker build command, like so:

docker build -t my-cloud-sdk-docker:alpine --build-arg CLOUD_SDK_VERSION=<release_number> .