gcloud command-line tool overview

This page contains an overview of the gcloud command-line tool and its common command patterns and capabilities.

What is the gcloud command-line tool?

The gcloud command-line interface is the primary CLI tool to create and manage Google Cloud resources. You can use this tool to perform many common platform tasks either from the command line or in scripts and other automations.

For example, you can use the gcloud CLI to create and manage:

  • Google Compute Engine virtual machine instances and other resources
  • Google Cloud SQL instances
  • Google Kubernetes Engine clusters
  • Google Cloud Dataproc clusters and jobs
  • Google Cloud DNS managed zones and record sets
  • Google Cloud Deployment manager deployments

You can also use the gcloud CLI to deploy App Engine applications, manage authentication, customize local configuration, and perform other tasks. Read the gcloud CLI reference to learn more about the capabilities of this tool.

The gcloud command-line tool cheat sheet

For a quick introduction to the gcloud command-line tool, a list of commonly used commands, and a look at how these commands are structured, refer to the gcloud command-line tool cheat sheet.

The gcloud CLI and Cloud SDK

The gcloud CLI is a part of the Google Cloud SDK. You must download and install the SDK on your system and initialize it before you can use the gcloud command-line tool.

By default, the SDK installs those gcloud CLI commands that are at the General Availability level only. Additional functionality is available in SDK components named alpha and beta. These components allow you to use the gcloud CLI to work with Google Cloud Bigtable, Google Cloud Dataflow and other parts of the Cloud Platform at earlier release levels than General Availability.

The gcloud CLI releases have the same version number as the SDK. The current SDK version is 305.0.0. You can download and install previous versions of the SDK from the download archive.

Downloading the gcloud command-line tool

You can download the latest version of Cloud SDK, which includes the gcloud command-line tool, from the download page.

Release levels

The gcloud CLI commands have the following release levels:

Release level Label Description
General Availability None Commands are considered fully stable and available for production use. Advance warnings will be made for commands that break current functionality and documented in the release notes.
Beta beta Commands are functionally complete, but may still have some outstanding issues. Breaking changes to these commands may be made without notice.
Alpha alpha Commands are in early release and may change without notice.

The alpha and beta components are not installed by default when you install the SDK. You must install these separately using the gcloud components install command. If you try to run an alpha or beta command and the corresponding component is not installed, the gcloud command-line tool will prompt you to install it.

Command groups

Within each release level, gcloud CLI commands are organized into a nested hierarchy of command groups, each of which represents a product or feature of the Cloud Platform or its functional subgroups.

For example:

Command group Description
gcloud compute Commands related to Compute Engine in general availability
gcloud compute instances Commands related to Compute Engine instances in general availability
gcloud beta compute Commands related to Compute Engine in Beta
gcloud alpha app Commands related to managing App Engine deployments in Alpha

Running gcloud CLI commands

You can run gcloud CLI commands from the command line in the same way you use other command-line tools. You can also run gcloud CLI commands from within scripts and other automations, for example, when using Jenkins to automate Cloud Platform tasks.


gcloud CLI properties are settings that affect the behavior of the gcloud CLI and other Cloud SDK tools. Some of these properties can be set by either global or command flags - in which case, the value set by the flag takes precedence.

A list of available properties can be found here.

Enabling accessibility features

For a more streamlined screen reader experience, the gcloud command-line tool comes with an accessibility/screen_reader property.

To enable this property, run:

gcloud config set accessibility/screen_reader true

For more details about the accessibility features that come with the gcloud command-line tool, refer to the Enabling accessibility features guide.


A configuration is a named set of gcloud CLI properties. It works like a profile, essentially.

Starting off with Cloud SDK, you'll work with a single configuration named default and you can set properties by running either gcloud init or gcloud config set. This single default configuration is suitable for most use cases.

If you'd like to work with multiple projects or authorization accounts, you can set up multiple configurations with gcloud config configurations create and switch among them accordingly. Within these configurations, you can customize properties. For example, to set your project within an active configuration use the project property: gcloud config set project <project-id>.

For a detailed account of these concepts, see these explorations of configurations and their management.

Global flags

The gcloud CLI provides a set of gcloud CLI-wide flags that govern the behavior of commands on a per-invocation level. Flags override any values set in SDK properties.

Positional Arguments and Flags

While both positional arguments and flags affect the output of a gcloud CLI command, there is a subtle difference in their use cases. A positional argument is used to define an entity on which a command operates while a flag is required to set a variation in a command's behaviour.

Use of stdout and stderr

Successful output of gcloud CLI commands is written to stdout. All other types of responses - prompts, warnings, and errors - are written to stderr. Note that anything written to stderr is not stable and should not be scripted against.

For a definitive list of guidelines on handling output, read this section.


To protect against unintended destructive actions, the gcloud CLI will confirm your intentions before executing commands such as gcloud projects delete.

You can also expect prompts if you were to create a Google Compute Engine virtual machine instance, say 'test-instance', using gcloud compute instances create test-instance. You will be asked to choose a zone to create the instance in.

To disable prompting, use the --quiet flag.

Note, the wording of prompts can change and should not be scripted against.

Suppressing prompting, writing to the terminal, and logging

The --quiet flag (also, -q) for the gcloud CLI disables all interactive prompts when running gcloud CLI commands and comes in handy when scripting. In the event input is needed, defaults will be used. If there aren't any, an error will be raised.

To suppress printing of command output to standard output and standard error in the terminal, use the --no-user-output-enabled flag.

To adjust verbosity of logs instead, use the --verbosity flag with an appropriate level (debug, info, warning, error, critical, or none).

Determining output structure

By default, when a gcloud CLI command returns a list of resources, they are pretty-printed to standard output. To produce more meaningful output, the format, filter and projection flags allow you to finetune your output.

If you'd like to define just the format of your output, use the --format flag to produce a tabulated or flattened version of your output (for interactive display) or a machine-readable version of the output (json, csv, yaml, value).

To format a list of keys that select resource data values, use projections. To further refine your output to criteria you define, use filter.

If you'd like to work through a quick interactive tutorial to help get you familiar with filter and format functionality, follow the link below.

Open in Cloud Shell

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