Sudipta Deb
Founder of Technical Potpourri, Co-Founder of Shrey Tech, Enterprise Cloud Architect
In the ever-evolving landscape of cloud computing, Google Cloud Platform (GCP) stands out as a beacon of innovation and efficiency. Among its suite of robust tools, one particularly shines for its versatility and user-friendliness: the Google Cloud Shell. This dynamic feature serves as a gateway to managing and manipulating cloud resources with ease and precision.
Google Cloud Shell is essentially a browser-based command line interface that offers a consistent development environment in GCP. It eliminates the need for local installations and configurations, providing a ready-to-use development environment with access to a wide array of Google Cloud resources.
While working with glcoud command, we need to specify values like Region, Zone, or Project Id. Now entering these values with each commands is not a good experience. It also increases the chance of making typing errors.
So in this blog post, I am going to show you how you can set the common values in environment variables and use them instead of typing the actual values.
The form you have selected does not exist.
Get List of Available Regions
You can execute the below command in cloud console to get list of available regions.
gcloud compute regions list
From the list, select the region and copy the name.
Create Environment Variable for Region
Step 1
Create the environment variable and include the region you selected in the previous step. In the below command, I am using the region us-east1.
INFRACLASS_REGION=us-east1
Step 2
Validate the environment variable using echo command.
echo $INFRACLASS_REGION
Append the Environment Variable to a File
Step 1
Create subdirectory and a config file.
mkdir myenv
touch myenv/config
Step 2
Append the value of your Region environment variable to the config file.
echo INFRACLASS_REGION=$INFRACLASS_REGION >> ~/myenv/config
Create Environment Variable for Project Id
Step 1
Create the environment variable and include the Project Id.
INFRACLASS_PROJECT_ID=[YOUR PROJECT ID]
Step 2
Validate the environment variable using echo command.
echo $INFRACLASS_PROJECT_ID
Append the Environment Variable to a File
Step 1
Append the value of your Project Id environment variable to the config file.
echo INFRACLASS_PROJECT_ID=$INFRACLASS_PROJECT_ID >> ~/myenv/config
Set the Environment Variables
Finally use the source comand to set the environment variables and use the echo command to verify that the project variable was set:
source myenv/config
echo $INFRACLASS_PROJECT_ID
Modify the bash Profile & Create Persistence
Execute the belo command
nano .profile
Then add the line at the end of the file and save:
source myenv/config
Now if you close your could shell and open a new one (resetting the vm), you can execute the command and get the desired output
echo $INFRACLASS_PROJECT_ID
Final Thoughts
In conclusion, Google Cloud Shell is more than just a command-line interface; it's a comprehensive, secure, and efficient environment for managing your cloud resources. Its ease of use, coupled with robust features, makes it an indispensable tool for anyone working in the Google Cloud ecosystem.
Disclaimer
This article is not endorsed by Salesforce, Google, or any other company in any way. I shared my knowledge on this topic in this blog post. Please always refer to Official Documentation for the latest information.
0 Comments