NAME

gcloud-compute-ssh - SSH into a virtual machine instance

SYNOPSIS

gcloud compute ssh
  [USER@]INSTANCE
  [--command COMMAND]
  [--container CONTAINER]
  [--dry-run]
  [--format FORMAT]
  [--help]
  [--plain]
  [--project PROJECT]
  [--quiet, -q]
  [--ssh-flag SSH_FLAG]
  [--ssh-key-file SSH_KEY_FILE]
  [--zone ZONE]
  [-h]

DESCRIPTION

gcloud compute ssh is a thin wrapper around the ssh(1) command that takes care of authentication and the translation of the instance name into an IP address.

This command ensures that the user’s public SSH key is present in the project’s metadata. If the user does not have a public SSH key, one is generated using ssh-keygen(1) .

POSITIONAL ARGUMENTS

[USER@]INSTANCE

Specifies the instance to SSH into.

“USER” specifies the username with which to SSH. If omitted, $USER from the environment is selected.

FLAGS

--command COMMAND

A command to run on the virtual machine.

--container CONTAINER

The name of a container inside of the virtual machine instance to connect to. This only applies to virtual machines that are using a Google container virtual machine image. For more information, see https://developers.google.com/compute/docs/containers .

--dry-run

If provided, prints the command that would be run to standard out instead of executing it.

--format FORMAT

Specify a format for printed output. By default, a command-specific human-friendly output format is used. Setting this flag to one of the available options will serialize the result of the command in the chosen format and print it to stdout. Supported formats are: "json", "text", "yaml".

--help

Display detailed help.

--plain

Suppresses the automatic addition of ssh(1) / scp(1) flags. This flag is useful if you want to take care of authentication yourself or re-enable strict host checking.

--project PROJECT

Google Cloud Platform project to use for this invocation.

--quiet

Disable all interactive prompts when running gcloud commands. If input is required, defaults will be used, or an error will be raised.

--ssh-flag SSH_FLAG

Additional flags to be passed to ssh(1) . It is recommended that flags be passed using an assignment operator and quotes. This flag will replace occurences of “%USER%” and “%INSTANCE%” with their dereferenced values. Example:

$ gcloud compute ssh my-instance --zone us-central1-a \
    --ssh-flag="-vvv" --ssh-flag="-L 80:%INSTANCE%:80"

is equivalent to passing the flags “--vvv” and “-L 80:162.222.181.197:80” to ssh(1) if the external IP address of “my-instance” is 162.222.181.197.

--ssh-key-file SSH_KEY_FILE

The path to the SSH key file. By deault, this is “~/.ssh/google_compute_engine”.

--zone ZONE

The zone of the instance to connect to. If not specified, you will be prompted to select a zone.

To avoid prompting when this flag is omitted, you can set the “compute/zone” property:

gcloud config set compute/zone ZONE

A list of zones can fetched by running:

gcloud compute zones list

To unset the property, run:

gcloud config unset compute/zone

Alternatively, the zone can be stored in the environment variable “CLOUDSDK_COMPUTE_ZONE”.

-h

Print a summary help and exit.

EXAMPLES

To SSH into “my-instance” in zone “us-central2-a”, run:

$ gcloud compute ssh my-instance --zone us-central2-a

You can also run a command on the virtual machine. For example, to get a snapshot of the guest’s process tree, run:

$ gcloud compute ssh my-instance --zone us-central2-a --command "ps -ejH"

If you are using the Google container virtual machine image, you can SSH into one of your containers with:

$ gcloud compute ssh my-instance \
    --zone us-central2-a \
    --container my-container

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