The command gcloud interactive allows you to use gcloud in interactive Python mode. All gcloud commands and command groups are available in interactive mode.

To start interactive mode, run the following command.

$ gcloud interactive
Google Cloud SDK interactive Python mode.

To use this mode in a Python script, add the following directory to your
PYTHONPATH.
  /usr/local/google-cloud-sdk/lib

Visit https://developers.google.com/cloud/sdk/interactive for more information.

>>> from googlecloudsdk.gcloud.gcloud import gcloud

>>>

gcloud interactive will put you in a Python REPL, where you can write Python code against a Python module that mimics the command line. For instance, to run the command gcloud auth login from interactive mode, execute the following Python code.

>>> gcloud.auth.login()
Your browser has been opened to visit:

    https://accounts.google.com/o/oauth2/auth?<snip>


Created new window in existing browser session.
<oauth2client.client.OAuth2Credentials object at 0x7f7f1803ab50>

Basic interaction

The functions that correspond to the CLI invocations also return actual Python objects, rather than printing data to be scraped.

>>> gcloud.auth.list()
auth_info(active_account='[email protected]', accounts=[u'[email protected]'])
>>> result = gcloud.auth.list()
>>> print result.active_account
[email protected]
>>> print result.accounts[0]
[email protected]

As a result, it's much more straightforward to do gcloud scripting using the Python mode, rather than using bash scripts and scraping the output. Not only is Python a more flexible programming language than bash, but the objects returned by the CLI invocations are much more stable. Specifically, a small change in the look-and-feel of a command's output will not affect the object returned in Python mode.

Passing command-line arguments in Python mode

The parameters that can be passed to the Python versions of gcloud commands correspond to the command-line arguments that are passed to the CLI. For instance, the command gcloud config set has the following help message.

$ gcloud config set -h
Usage: gcloud config set [optional flags] PROPERTY VALUE

Set the value for an option, so that Cloud SDK tools can use them as
configuration.

optional flags:
  --global-only          Set the option in the global properties file.
  --help                 Display detailed help.
  -h                     Print a summary help and exit.

positional arguments:
  PROPERTY               The property to be set.
  VALUE                  The value to be set.

The function gcloud.config.set has two required parameters and one optional parameter. Each one must be provided as a named parameter, eg foo(x=y) instead of foo(y) . Their order does not matter. The special options -h and --help are not available in Python mode.

To manipulate the config properties in Python mode, the following instructions can be run.

>>> gcloud.config.list()
{'core': {'project': 'original_project', 'account': '[email protected]', 'disable_usage_reporting': 'false'}}
>>> gcloud.config.set(property='project', value='new_project')
>>> gcloud.config.list()
{'core': {'project': 'new_project', 'account': '[email protected]', 'disable_usage_reporting': 'false'}}

Scripting against gcloud

To write a Python script that has access to the gcloud Python object, add the google-cloud-sdk/lib directory to your PYTHONPATH add the following import statement to your .py script.

from googlecloudsdk.gcloud.gcloud import gcloud

Then, your script can manipulate the gcloud object exactly like you can while in the gcloud interactive Python shell.