Setting up your environment

For installations on Google Kubernetes Engine, you can follow the installation guides using Cloud Shell, an in-browser command line interface to your Google Cloud resources, or your own computer running Linux or macOS.

Option A: Use Cloud Shell

Cloud Shell provisions a g1-small Compute Engine virtual machine (VM) running a Debian-based Linux operating system. The advantages to using Cloud Shell are:

Cloud Shell includes the gcloud, kubectl and helm command-line tools that you need.
Your Cloud Shell $HOME directory has 5GB persistent storage space.
You have your choice of text editors:
- Code editor, which you access by clicking at the top of the Cloud Shell window.
- Emacs, Vim, or Nano, which you access from the command line in Cloud Shell.

To use Cloud Shell:

Go to the Google Cloud console.
Select your Cloud project.
Click the Activate Cloud Shell button at the top of the Google Cloud console window.

A Cloud Shell session opens inside a new frame at the bottom of the Google Cloud console and displays a command-line prompt.

Update the components:

gcloud components update

The command responds with output similar to the following:

ERROR: (gcloud.components.update)
You cannot perform this action because the gcloud CLI component manager
is disabled for this installation. You can run the following command
to achieve the same result for this installation:

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get --only-upgrade install ...

Copy the long command and paste it to update the components.
Install kubectl:
```
sudo apt-get install kubectl
```

Install kpt:

sudo apt-get install google-cloud-sdk-kpt

Option B: Use command-line tools locally

On your local machine, install and initialize the gcloud CLI.

Authenticate with the Google Cloud CLI:
```
gcloud auth login
```
Update the components:
```
gcloud components update
```
Install kubectl:
```
gcloud components install kubectl
```
Install kpt:
```
gcloud components install kpt
```