How to install Google cloud platform(GCP) sdk – gcloud cli tool

The instructions below were testing in Ubuntu Linux.

gcloud is the command line interface(CLI) tool for interacting with GCP services. Per Google’s product overview page for gcloud – “The Cloud SDK is a set of tools for Cloud Platform. It contains gcloud, gsutil, and bq, which you can use to access Google Compute Engine, Google Cloud Storage, Google BigQuery, and other products and services from the command-line. You can run these tools interactively or in your automated scripts”.

Let us download, install and initialize this tool in an interactive manner, accept all default settings for all prompts –

$ curl https://sdk.cloud.google.com | bash && exec -l $SHELL
$ gcloud init

$ gcloud version
Google Cloud SDK 224.0.0
bq 2.0.36
core 2018.11.02
gsutil 4.34

$ gcloud compute regions list
NAME                     CPUS  DISKS_GB  ADDRESSES  RESERVED_ADDRESSES  STATUS  TURNDOWN_DATE
asia-east1               0/8   0/2048    0/8        0/1                 UP
asia-east2               0/8   0/2048    0/8        0/1                 UP
asia-northeast1          0/8   0/2048    0/8        0/1                 UP
asia-south1              0/8   0/2048    0/8        0/1                 UP
asia-southeast1          0/8   0/2048    0/8        0/1                 UP
australia-southeast1     0/8   0/2048    0/8        0/1                 UP
europe-north1            0/8   0/2048    0/8        0/1                 UP
europe-west1             0/8   0/2048    0/8        0/1                 UP
europe-west2             0/8   0/2048    0/8        0/1                 UP
europe-west3             0/8   0/2048    0/8        0/1                 UP
europe-west4             0/8   0/2048    0/8        0/1                 UP
northamerica-northeast1  0/8   0/2048    0/8        0/1                 UP
southamerica-east1       0/8   0/2048    0/8        0/1                 UP
us-central1              0/8   0/2048    0/8        0/1                 UP
us-east1                 2/8   31/2048   2/8        0/1                 UP
us-east4                 0/8   0/2048    0/8        0/1                 UP
us-west1                 0/8   0/2048    0/8        0/1                 UP
us-west2                 0/8   0/2048    0/8        0/1                 UP

Only the core components of the gcloud sdk are installed during initial installation. For any additional component to interact with GCP, you have to install the additional component. For instance, to install the component for interactive with Google Kubernetes Engine(GKE) you have to install kubectl

gcloud components install kubectl

Many features of GCP are available in Beta only, for that you have to install the beta component –

gcloud components install beta

Stay up to date with  –

gcloud components update 

.

Tab completion and running commands in Beta feature –

$ gcloud beta container  [tab][tab]
binauthz  clusters  get-server-config  images  node-pools  operations  subnets

$ gcloud beta container get-server-config
Fetching server config for us-east1-c
defaultClusterVersion: 1.9.7-gke.7
defaultImageType: COS
validImageTypes:
- COS
- UBUNTU
- COS_CONTAINERD
validMasterVersions:
- 1.11.2-gke.15
- 1.10.9-gke.3
- 1.10.7-gke.9
- 1.10.6-gke.9
- 1.9.7-gke.7
validNodeVersions:
- 1.11.2-gke.15
- 1.11.2-gke.9
- 1.10.9-gke.3
- 1.10.9-gke.0
- 1.10.7-gke.9
- 1.10.7-gke.6
- 1.10.7-gke.2
- 1.10.7-gke.1
- 1.10.6-gke.9
- 1.10.6-gke.6
- 1.10.6-gke.4
- 1.10.6-gke.3
- 1.10.6-gke.2
- 1.10.6-gke.1
- 1.10.5-gke.4
- 1.10.5-gke.3
- 1.10.5-gke.2
- 1.10.5-gke.0
- 1.10.4-gke.3
- 1.10.4-gke.2
- 1.10.4-gke.0
- 1.10.2-gke.4
- 1.10.2-gke.3
- 1.10.2-gke.1
- 1.9.7-gke.7
- 1.9.7-gke.6
- 1.9.7-gke.5
- 1.9.7-gke.4
- 1.9.7-gke.3
- 1.9.7-gke.1
- 1.9.7-gke.0
- 1.9.6-gke.2
- 1.9.6-gke.1
- 1.9.3-gke.0
- 1.8.12-gke.3
- 1.8.12-gke.2
- 1.8.12-gke.1
- 1.8.12-gke.0
- 1.8.10-gke.2
- 1.8.10-gke.0
- 1.8.9-gke.1
- 1.8.8-gke.0
- 1.7.15-gke.0
- 1.7.12-gke.2
- 1.6.13-gke.1

Reference –

Installation – https://cloud.google.com/sdk/docs/downloads-interactive#linux

SDK Components – https://cloud.google.com/sdk/docs/components

Tips and Tricks – https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2014/03/tips-and-tricks-command-line-access-to.html

Ansible : How to run playbooks as a shell script

Ansible is a powerful tool for automation, its syntax checking, verbose and dry run mode features make it a reliable and safe tool. It is particularly popular in IT infrastructure automation, such as application deployment or full fledged infrastructure plus app deployment. As an integral part of DevOps tool-set, it falls into the category of Chef, Puppet, Salt or CFEngine for the critical role it plays in IT infrastructure, Application Deployment, Configuration Management and Continuous Delivery.

In this short blog, I am writing about a little known or less popular usage of Ansible – executing it like a shell script. In a Unix-like operating system, any text file with its content starting with a #! aka Shebang, is executed by passing the text file as an argument to the characters following the Shebang. For instance, a text file /tmp/myscript.sh with its content starting with the characters #!/bin/bash is run by the program loader as /bin/bash /tmp/myscript. Following the same logic, we can execute any ansible playbook by simply starting the content of the playbook file with a path to the ansible executable. 

Thus for me to execute my playbooks just like a script, the first thing I need to know is the path to my Ansible executable –

$ which ansible
/usr/local/bin/ansible

And have a playbook – in this case, I will use two playbook – one which adds a user and the second one which deletes the same user as examples.
Notice that I am naming the playbook just like a shell script and made it executable –

$ cat add-user.sh 
#!/usr/local/bin/ansible-playbook
---
- hosts: localhost
  tasks:
  - name: Add user
    user: name={{ username }} comment={{ comment }} state=present shell={{ shell }}
    become: yes

When I execute this script, I will pass the parameters needed to add a user as ansible Extra variables. Now let us run the script in dry run mode first –

$ id john
id: ‘john’: no such user

$ ./add-user.sh -e "username=john comment='John Doe' shell=/bin/bash" -v --check
Using /etc/ansible/ansible.cfg as config file

PLAY [localhost] ************************************************************************************************************************************

TASK [Gathering Facts] ******************************************************************************************************************************
ok: [localhost]

TASK [Add user] *************************************************************************************************************************************
changed: [localhost] => {"changed": true}

PLAY RECAP ******************************************************************************************************************************************
localhost : ok=2 changed=1 unreachable=0 failed=0

Everything looks good, so let us execute it –

$ ./add-user.sh -e "username=john comment='John Doe' shell=/bin/bash" -v
Using /etc/ansible/ansible.cfg as config file

PLAY [localhost] ************************************************************************************************************************************

TASK [Gathering Facts] ******************************************************************************************************************************
ok: [localhost]

TASK [Add user] *************************************************************************************************************************************
changed: [localhost] => {"changed": true, "comment": "John Doe", "create_home": true, "group": 1002, "home": "/home/john", "name": "john", "shell": "/bin/bash", "state": "present", "stderr": "useradd: warning: the home directory already exists.\nNot copying any file from skel directory into it.\n", "stderr_lines": ["useradd: warning: the home directory already exists.", "Not copying any file from skel directory into it."], "system": false, "uid": 1002}

PLAY RECAP ******************************************************************************************************************************************
localhost : ok=2 changed=1 unreachable=0 failed=0

$ id john
uid=1002(john) gid=1002(john) groups=1002(john)

Deleting the user is similar, we just write an equivalent playbook and we pass only the username name as an extra var this time –

$ cat del-user.sh
#!/usr/local/bin/ansible-playbook
---
- hosts: localhost
tasks:
- name: Delete user
user: name={{ username }} state=absent
become: yes

$ ./del-user.sh -e username=john -v --check
Using /etc/ansible/ansible.cfg as config file

PLAY [localhost] ************************************************************************************************************************************

TASK [Gathering Facts] ******************************************************************************************************************************
ok: [localhost]

TASK [Delete user] **********************************************************************************************************************************
changed: [localhost] => {"changed": true}

PLAY RECAP ******************************************************************************************************************************************
localhost : ok=2 changed=1 unreachable=0 failed=0

$ ./del-user.sh -e username=john -v
Using /etc/ansible/ansible.cfg as config file

PLAY [localhost] ************************************************************************************************************************************

TASK [Gathering Facts] ******************************************************************************************************************************
ok: [localhost]

TASK [Delete user] **********************************************************************************************************************************
changed: [localhost] => {"changed": true, "force": false, "name": "john", "remove": false, "state": "absent"}

PLAY RECAP ******************************************************************************************************************************************
localhost : ok=2 changed=1 unreachable=0 failed=0

$ id john
id: ‘john’: no such user

You can find more on Ansible in the documentation section of the official site.