Comprehensive reference for the Google Cloud CLI (gcloud). Use this skill whenever working with GCP infrastructure, services, or tooling via the command line. Triggers include: any mention of "gcloud", "Google Cloud", "GCP", Cloud Functions, Cloud Run, Compute Engine, IAM, service accounts, authentication with Google Cloud, ADC (Application Default Credentials), GCP emulators (Firestore, Pub/Sub, Bigtable, Datastore, Spanner), or any task requiring interaction with Google Cloud Platform from a terminal. Also use when deploying to GCP, managing GCP projects/configs, or debugging GCP authentication issues.
Provide accurate, up-to-date guidance for using the gcloud command-line tool to manage Google Cloud Platform resources and services.
All gcloud commands follow: gcloud [GROUP] [SUBGROUP] [COMMAND] [FLAGS]
Common global flags available on every command:
--project PROJECT_ID — override active project--account ACCOUNT — override active account--format FORMAT — output as json, yaml, csv, table, text, value, etc.--quiet / -q — disable interactive prompts--impersonate-service-account SA_EMAIL — run as a service account without a key file--verbosity LEVEL — debug, info, warning, error, critical, none--configuration CONFIG — use a named configurationManage multiple project/account/region profiles:
gcloud config configurations create NAME
gcloud config configurations activate NAME
gcloud config set project PROJECT_ID
gcloud config set compute/region REGION
gcloud config set compute/zone ZONE
gcloud config list
| Group | Purpose | Reference |
|---|---|---|
auth | Authentication & credentials | references/auth.md |
config | CLI configuration & named configurations | references/config.md |
projects | Manage GCP projects | references/projects.md |
iam | IAM roles, policies, service accounts | references/iam.md |
compute | VMs, disks, networks, firewalls, load balancers | references/compute.md |
container | GKE clusters and node pools | references/container.md |
functions | Cloud Functions (deploy, call, logs) | references/functions-and-run.md |
run | Cloud Run services and jobs | references/functions-and-run.md |
app | App Engine applications | references/app.md |
builds | Cloud Build triggers and submissions | references/builds.md |
storage | Cloud Storage buckets and objects (also gsutil) | references/storage.md |
firestore | Firestore databases and indexes | references/firestore.md |
pubsub | Pub/Sub topics and subscriptions | references/pubsub.md |
sql | Cloud SQL instances | references/sql.md |
secrets | Secret Manager | references/secrets.md |
logging | Cloud Logging read/write | references/logging.md |
monitoring | Cloud Monitoring dashboards and alerts | references/monitoring.md |
artifacts | Artifact Registry repos | references/artifacts.md |
dns | Cloud DNS zones and records | references/dns.md |
kms | Cloud KMS keys | references/kms.md |
emulators | Local dev emulators | references/emulators.md |
services | Enable/disable APIs (gcloud services enable ...) | references/services.md |
components | Manage SDK components (gcloud components install ...) | references/components.md |
Bundled sub-tools: bq (BigQuery), gsutil (Cloud Storage), kubectl (Kubernetes).
gcloud functions deploy FUNCTION_NAME \
--gen2 --runtime python312 --trigger-http \
--allow-unauthenticated --region REGION \
--source . --entry-point main
gcloud run deploy SERVICE_NAME \
--image IMAGE_URL --region REGION \
--allow-unauthenticated --set-env-vars KEY=VALUE
gcloud services enable firestore.googleapis.com
gcloud services list --enabled
gcloud iam service-accounts create SA_NAME --display-name "Description"
gcloud projects add-iam-policy-binding PROJECT_ID \
--member="serviceAccount:SA_NAME@PROJECT_ID.iam.gserviceaccount.com" \
--role="roles/ROLE"
gcloud info — active config, account, project, SDK paths, Python versiongcloud auth list — all credentialed accounts and which is activegcloud config list — active configuration valuesGOOGLE_APPLICATION_CREDENTIALS env var and run gcloud auth application-default login--log-http on any command to see raw HTTP requests/responses--verbosity debug for maximum diagnostic output