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This page contains tips that might be useful when you use the gcloud
command-line tool to manage your Compute Engine resources. For a complete list of all available gcloud compute
flags and commands, you can use the built-in command help (--help
) or the published reference documentation, or the gcloud core documentation.
Install the Google Cloud CLI. After installation, initialize the Google Cloud CLI by running the following command:
gcloud init
If you're using an external identity provider (IdP), you must first sign in to the gcloud CLI with your federated identity.
Note: If you installed the gcloud CLI previously, make sure you have the latest version by runninggcloud components update
.You can fetch information about Compute Engine resources in two ways: using the list
command to return a list of resources and using the describe
command to return details about one specific resource.
list
commands
The list
commands are designed to return a human-readable table of the most relevant data for the requested resources. You can optionally filter your results to return a shorter list with more relevant results.
gcloud compute instances list
command.
--limit
The maximum number of results to return. This flag is particularly useful when used with the --sort-by
flag as described in the Fetching resources with describe commands section.
--sort-by SORT_BY
A field to sort by, if applicable. To perform a descending-order sort, prefix the value with a tilde ("~"). This flag interacts with other flags that are applied in this order: --flatten
,--sort-by
, --filter
, --limit
.
describe
commands
The describe
commands are designed for displaying data about one resource. You must provide the name of the resource in the describe
command. If you can't remember the resource name, you can run a list
command to get a list of resources. For example, the following two commands illustrate a scenario when you can list images to get an image name and its associated project so that you can provide these as inputs to a describe
command:
gcloud compute images list
NAME PROJECT FAMILY DEPRECATED STATUS ... centos-7-v20170620 centos-cloud centos-7 READY ... debian-9-stretch-v20170619 debian-cloud debian-9 READY ...
gcloud compute images describe debian-9-stretch-v20170619 --project debian-cloud
The default output from describe
commands is YAML format, but you can use the --format
flag to choose between JSON, YAML, and text output formats. JSON formatted output can be useful if you are parsing the output, while text formatted output puts each property on a separate line.
gcloud compute regions describe us-central1 --format json
{ "creationTimestamp": "2013-09-06T10:36:54.847-07:00", "description": "us-central1", "id": "6837843067389011605", "kind": "compute#region", "name": "us-central1", ... "status": "UP", "zones": [ "https://www.googleapis.com/compute/v1/projects/myproject/zones/us-central1-a", "https://www.googleapis.com/compute/v1/projects/myproject/zones/us-central1-b", "https://www.googleapis.com/compute/v1/projects/myproject/zones/us-central1-f" ] }Examples Examples of
list
commands
When you list resources, you get an easy-to-read table of summary data. For example, to return summary data about instances in your project, use the instances list
command:
gcloud compute instances list
NAME ZONE MACHINE_TYPE INTERNAL_IP EXTERNAL_IP STATUS example-instance asia-east1-b e2-standard-2 10.240.95.199 107.167.182.44 RUNNING example-instance2 us-central1-a e2-standard-2 10.240.173.254 23.251.148.121 RUNNING test-instance us-central1-a e2-standard-2 10.240.118.207 23.251.153.172 RUNNING
You can filter results from list
commands with regular expressions by including the --filter
flag with a key ~ value
operator. For example, filter the list of instances to include only the instances with "test" in the instance name:
gcloud compute instances list --filter="name ~ .*test.*"
NAME ZONE MACHINE_TYPE INTERNAL_IP EXTERNAL_IP STATUS test-instance us-central1-a e2-standard-2 10.240.118.207 23.251.153.172 RUNNING
To return a list of zone operations that have a status
of DONE
and don't have an httpStatus
of 200
, apply a zone
filter on an operations list
command, then grep
the results:
gcloud compute operations list --filter="zone:(us-central1-a)" | grep DONE | grep -v 200
NAME HTTP_STATUS TYPE TARGET STATUS operation-1397752585735-4f73fa25b4b58-f0920fd5-254d709f 400 delete us-central1-a/disks/example-instance DONE operation-1398357613036-4f7cc80cb41e0-765bcba6-34bbd040 409 insert us-central1-a/instances/i-1 DONE operation-1398615481237-4f8088aefbe08-cc300dfa-2ce113cf 409 insert us-central1-a/instances/i-2 DONE
To get a list of list of disks in us-central1-a
, sorted in descending order by name (--sort-by ~NAME
), use a disks list
command:
gcloud compute disks list --sort-by ~NAME --filter="zone:(us-central1-a)"
In some scenarios, you may want to have the full URI link to the resource, such as requests where you are passing the output from a list
command to another command or application that takes a list of resource links. To show full URI resource links, use the --uri
flag with a list
command.
gcloud compute instances list --uri --filter="name~'^example-.*'"
https://compute.googleapis.com/compute/v1/projects/myproject/zones/us-central1-a/instances/example-instance1 https://compute.googleapis.com/compute/v1/projects/myproject/zones/us-central1-a/instances/example-instance2
To use the previous list
command output within a command that deletes instances, use:
gcloud compute instances delete $(gcloud compute instances list --uri --filter="name~'^example-.*'")
Examples of describe
commands
To get details about just one instance, specify the instance, including zone. For example, to return information about the instance named "example-instance" in the "asia-east1-b" zone, you can use instances describe
command:
gcloud compute instances describe example-instance --zone asia-east1-b
By default, this returns YAML output. To change the output to JSON or text (one property per line) use the --format
flag. For example, to return text output for the same instance, use:
gcloud compute instances describe example-instance --zone asia-east1-b --format text
--- canIpForward: False creationTimestamp: 2014-04-19T06:43:04.087-07:00 disks[0].autoDelete: False disks[0].boot: True disks[0].deviceName: example-instance ...
To get details about a specific operation, use the operations list
command to find the fully qualified URI of the operation:
gcloud compute operations list --filter="zone:(us-central1-a)"
NAME TYPE TARGET HTTP_STATUS STATUS operation-1406155165815-4fee4032850d9-7b78077c-a170c5c0 delete us-central1-a/instances/example-instance 200 DONE operation-1406155180632-4fee4040a67c1-bf581ed8-ab5af2b8 delete us-central1-a/instances/example-instance-2 200 DONE ...
Then use the URI in an operations describe
command:
gcloud compute operations describe \
operation-1406155165815-4fee4032850d9-7b78077c-a170c5c0 --zone us-central1-a
endTime: '2014-07-23T15:40:02.463-07:00' id: '31755455923038965' insertTime: '2014-07-23T15:39:25.910-07:00' kind: compute#operation name: operation-1406155165815-4fee4032850d9-7b78077c-a170c5c0 operationType: delete progress: 100 ...
The following command gets instance settings in JSON format (--format json
).
gcloud compute instances describe example-instance \
--zone us-central1-a
--format json
{ ... "name": "example-instance", "networkInterfaces": [ { "accessConfigs": [ { "kind": "compute#accessConfig", "name": "external-nat", "natIP": "107.167.187.66", "type": "ONE_TO_ONE_NAT" } ], "name": "nic0", "network": "https://www.googleapis.com/compute/v1/projects/myproject/global/networks/default", "networkIP": "10.240.111.51" } ], ... "status": "RUNNING" ... }
Use the following command to find out which account you are authorizes as, use:
gcloud auth list
Revoking a refresh token
To revoke the credentials for an account on the machine where you are using the Google Cloud CLI, use:
gcloud auth revoke
This will force you to use re-authenticate using gcloud init
.
You can also revoke permission for the gcloud CLI to access your resources. You might do this, if your refresh tokens are compromised, for example. To revoke permission for the gcloud CLI:
To reset an instance named "example-instance" in the "us-central1-a" zone, use the instances reset
command:
gcloud compute instances reset example-instance --zone us-central1-a
For information about the implications of a reset, read the Reset an instance documentation.
Except as otherwise noted, the content of this page is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License, and code samples are licensed under the Apache 2.0 License. For details, see the Google Developers Site Policies. Java is a registered trademark of Oracle and/or its affiliates.
Last updated 2025-08-07 UTC.
[[["Easy to understand","easyToUnderstand","thumb-up"],["Solved my problem","solvedMyProblem","thumb-up"],["Other","otherUp","thumb-up"]],[["Hard to understand","hardToUnderstand","thumb-down"],["Incorrect information or sample code","incorrectInformationOrSampleCode","thumb-down"],["Missing the information/samples I need","missingTheInformationSamplesINeed","thumb-down"],["Other","otherDown","thumb-down"]],["Last updated 2025-08-07 UTC."],[[["This guide provides instructions on using the `gcloud` command-line tool to manage Compute Engine resources, with a focus on fetching information using `list` and `describe` commands."],["Before using `gcloud`, you must first set up authentication, which can be done by installing and initializing the Google Cloud CLI, using `gcloud init` or setting a default region and zone."],["The `list` commands return a summary table of resources and support optional filtering with regular expressions, the `--limit` flag for result quantity, and `--sort-by` for sorting."],["The `describe` commands display detailed data about a single resource, outputting in YAML by default but can be formatted using `--format` for JSON or text, and require the resource name as an input, which can be found using a `list` command."],["Authentication can be managed using the `gcloud auth` commands, including viewing credentials with `gcloud auth list` and revoking access with `gcloud auth revoke`."]]],[]]
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