How To Configure Google Cloud SDK on Mac

Install the Cloud SDK using Homebrew and start managing your projects via CLI

Ahad Sheriff
3 min readNov 23, 2021

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Source: Google Cloud Platform

The Google Cloud SDK includes a CLI tool and lets developers run gcloud commands to help manage their projects. Sure, you could always just download and install the SDK directly, or you could skip a few steps and install it using Homebrew as I outline below.

Prerequisites

Make sure you have Python installed (Python 3 (3.5 to 3.8, 3.7 recommended) or Python 2 (2.7.9 or higher)

$ python -v

Make sure you have HomeBrew (and that it’s up to date):

$ brew --version
$ brew update

Install the Cask plugin. If you’re unfamiliar, Cask extends Homebrew and allows you to install large binary files via CLI.

$ brew tap homebrew/cask

Install the Cloud SDK

  1. Install the SDK via Homebrew
$ brew cask install google-cloud-sdk

2. Add SDK to your shell profile (i.e. ~/.zshrc )

# GCP SDK
source "$(brew --prefix)/Caskroom/google-cloud-sdk/latest/google-cloud-sdk/path.zsh.inc"
source "$(brew --prefix)/Caskroom/google-cloud-sdk/latest/google-cloud-sdk/completion.zsh.inc"

3. Verify the installation

$ gcloud version
Google Cloud SDK 365.0.0
bq 2.0.71
core 2021.11.12
gsutil 5.5

4. Authenticate your developer account

$ gcloud auth login

This will open up a browser window, where you can log in to your Google user account. Click Allow to grant permission to access your Google Cloud resource.

Set Up Your Project

  1. Initialize the Cloud SDK and login if prompted
$ gcloud init

2. Select the Google Cloud project you want to work on

Pick cloud project to use:
[1] [my-project-1]
[2] [my-project-2]
...
Please enter your numeric choice:

3. Choose a compute zone

Which compute zone would you like to use as project default?
[1]…

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