This brief guide teaches you how to provision gcloud compute resources using the gcloud CLI. You can always read more about the CLI on Google Cloud CLI documentation . I am using the documentation as a reference as well.

Authentication

To use gcloud CLI you need to be authenticated.

gcloud auth login

This will launch a browser window asking you to sign in to Google Cloud SDK using your Google account. Make sure you are familiar with the permissions you are granting the gcloud CLI

Set the Project

Once you are logged in you will be asked to provide a project id. This scopes the gcloud CLI. To list all the projects linked to your account run the following and then set the gcloud CLI project.

gcloud projects list # To list all of your projects. Copy desired project ID and

# Set the project scope for the CLI
gcloud config set project PROJECT_ID

Create an Instance

When creating a Compute instance we want to be able to set the following specifications. You can always view the man pages for the CLI or the gcloud compute instaces create INSTNACE_NAME --help which actually opens the man pages for that particular command. Alternatively, you can also view the gcloud Instance Createreference

The following shows the specification/parameter name, the associated gcloud CLI flags and a brief description of the flag.

• Zone --zone=[ZONE]
  • The zone your instance will be hosted in. Make sure the instance type is supported, as only certain instance types are available in certain regions. To check the available zones refer to gcloud sdk region zones reference
  • eg. London is in --zone=europe-west2-a could be a,b, c
• Instance Type --machine-type=INSTANCE_TYPE
  • Specifies the machine type used for the instances. To get a list of available machine types, run ‘gcloud compute machine-types list’.
• Linux Distro--image=IMAGE_NAME or --image-family=IMAGE_FAMILY
  • To list the available images run gcloud compute images list and grep the desired Linux distribution. I normally go with Debian. If you want the latest version of a family such as Debian, you can use image-family='debian-12', this will use the latest version of the image. Otherwise you have to list the full name of the image. eg. image=debian-12-bookworm-v20241009
• Disk Size --boot-disk-size=SIZE_IN_GB
  • The disk size in GB. By default it creates disk of type pd-standard or Persistent Disk Standard, which is fine for normal use.
• Hostname --hostname=HOSTNAME
  • Sets the hostname of the instance created. Gcloud requires to input two labels sperated by a ‘dot’. eg: --hostname=personal.server
• Startup Script and Other Metadata --metadata=[KEY=VALUE] or --metadata-from-file
  • You can use this to setup a startup script that runs on instance creation. For larger scripts its recommended to use --metadata-from-file startup-script=./PATH_TO_FILE

This command creates e2-small instance running debian-12 with 20GB disk size.

gcloud compute instances create personal \
	--zone europe-west2-a \
	--machine-type e2-small \
	--boot-disk-size 20GB \
	--image-family debian-12 \
	--image-project debian-cloud \
	--hostname personal.server