gcloud Cheat Sheet

Google Cloud CLI — auth, projects, compute, GKE, gsutil-adjacent storage, and service accounts.

Cloud5 sections · 32 commands
⌘K

Auth & Config

8
gcloud auth login

Interactive login (browser)

gcloud auth application-default login

ADCs for local code (APIs)

gcloud auth activate-service-account KEY.json

Service account for CI

gcloud auth list

Active credentials

gcloud config get-value project

Current project

gcloud config set project PROJECT_ID

Set the working project

gcloud config set compute/zone us-central1-a

Default zone

gcloud projects list

Projects you can access

Compute

7
gcloud compute instances list

Instances and their IPs

gcloud compute ssh INSTANCE

SSH with generated keys

gcloud compute scp FILE INSTANCE:~/

Copy to an instance

gcloud compute instances start/stop/delete INSTANCE

Lifecycle actions

gcloud compute instances create INSTANCE --machine-type=e2-micro --image-family=ubuntu-2204-lts --image-project=ubuntu-os-cloud

Create an instance

gcloud compute snapshots create --source-disk-disk=DISK

Backup a disk

gcloud compute firewall-rules list

Ingress rules

GKE & Containers

5
gcloud container clusters list

Clusters in the project

gcloud container clusters get-credentials CLUSTER

Load credentials for kubectl

gcloud container clusters resize CLUSTER --num-nodes=5

Scale node pools

gcloud artifacts docker images list LOCATION-docker.pkg.dev/PROJECT/REPO

Container registry images

gcloud container images describe IMAGE

Image metadata

Storage (gsutil)

7
gsutil ls

List buckets

gsutil ls gs://BUCKET/**

Recursive object list

gsutil cp FILE gs://BUCKET/file

Upload

gsutil cp -r DIR gs://BUCKET/

Upload a directory tree

gsutil rsync DIR gs://BUCKET

Sync local to bucket

gsutil cp gs://BUCKET/file .

Download

gsutil du -sh gs://BUCKET

Size of a bucket

Logging & Audit

5
gcloud logging read 'severity>=ERROR' --limit=50

Query recent errors

gcloud logging read 'resource.type=k8s_container'

Kubernetes logs

gcloud logging write --payload-type=text LOG-NAME 'text'

Write an entry

gcloud audit logs list

Who did what when

gcloud beta container clusters describe CLUSTER --log-http

Debug with request logs