Use this command to set the default zone for project myproject-123456 to europe-west4-a and the default region to europe-west4:

gcloud compute project-info add-metadata \
--metadata google-compute-default-region=europe-west4,google-compute-default-zone=europe-west4-a\
--project myproject-123456

Also see the official reference for more detailed information.

If you want to connect to a Google Cloud VM instance (my-instance in this example) from your command line using SSH, use this command:

rsync -Pavz [local file] $(gcloud compute instances list --filter="name=my-instance" --format "get(networkInterfaces[0].accessConfigs[0].natIP)"):

The subcommand (enclosed in $(...) ) finds the correct external IP address for your instance (see How to find IP address of Google Cloud VM instance on command line for more details), so this command boils down to for example

rsync -Pavz [local file] 35.207.77.101:

Using the -Pavz option is not specifically neccessary but these are the options I regularly use for rsync file transfers. You can use any rsync options, Google Cloud does not impose any specific restrictions here. For reference see the rsync manpage.

In case you want to use a different username for the SSH login, you can of course prefix the $(...) section like this:

rsync -Pavz [local file] sshuser@$(gcloud compute instances list --filter="name=my-instance" --format "get(networkInterfaces[0].accessConfigs[0].natIP)"):

If you want to connect to a Google Cloud VM instance (my-instance in this example) from your command line using SSH, you have two options:

Directly connect using gcloud

This will always work if your instance has SSH enabled, even if it does not have an external IP:

gcloud compute ssh my-instance --zone $(gcloud compute instances list --filter="name=my-instance" --format "get(zone)" | awk -F/ '{print $NF}')

Note that your have to replace my-instance by your actual instance name two times in the command above. The subcommand (enclosed in $(...) ) finds the correct zone for your instance since at the time of writing this article gcloud compute ssh will not work unless you set the correct zone for that instance. See How to find zone of Google Cloud VM instance on command line for more details.

Connect using external IP

You can also use gcloud to get the external IP and connect to it using your standard SSH client.

ssh $(gcloud compute instances list --filter="name=my-instance" --format "get(networkInterfaces[0].accessConfigs[0].natIP)")

This has the added advantage that your will be able to use this in other SSH-like command like rsync.

For reference also see the official manual on Securely Connecting to Instances

Problem:

You have a VM instance (my-instance in our example) for which you want to find out the zone it’s residing in using the gcloud command line tool.

Solution:

If you just want to see the zone of the instance (remember to replace my-instance by your instance name!), use

gcloud compute instances list --filter="name=my-instance" --format "[box]"

This will format the output nicely and show you more information about your instance. Example output:

┌─────────────┬────────────────┬─────────────────────────────┬─────────────┬─────────────┬───────────────┬─────────┐
│    NAME     │      ZONE      │         MACHINE_TYPE        │ PREEMPTIBLE │ INTERNAL_IP │  EXTERNAL_IP  │  STATUS │
├─────────────┼────────────────┼─────────────────────────────┼─────────────┼─────────────┼───────────────┼─────────┤
│ my-instance │ europe-west3-c │ custom (16 vCPU, 32.00 GiB) │             │ 10.156.0.1  │ 35.207.77.101 │ RUNNING │
└─────────────┴────────────────┴─────────────────────────────┴─────────────┴─────────────┴───────────────┴─────────┘

In this example, the zone is europe-west3-c.

In case you want to see only the zone, use this command instead:

gcloud compute instances list --filter="name=katc-main" --format "get(zone)" | awk -F/ '{print $NF}'

Example output:

europe-west3-c

Also see our other post How to find IP address of Google Cloud VM instance on command line.

In order to see what other information about instances you can see in a similar fashion, use

gcloud compute instances list --filter="name=my-instance" --format "text"

Problem:

You have a VM instance (my-instance in our example) for which you want to get the external or internal IP using the gcloud command line tool.

Solution:

If you just want to see the external IP of the instance (remember to replace my-instance by your instance name!), use

gcloud compute instances list --filter="name=my-instance" --format "[box]"

This will format the output nicely and show you more information about your instance. Example output:

┌─────────────┬────────────────┬─────────────────────────────┬─────────────┬─────────────┬───────────────┬─────────┐
│    NAME     │      ZONE      │         MACHINE_TYPE        │ PREEMPTIBLE │ INTERNAL_IP │  EXTERNAL_IP  │  STATUS │
├─────────────┼────────────────┼─────────────────────────────┼─────────────┼─────────────┼───────────────┼─────────┤
│ my-instance │ europe-west3-c │ custom (16 vCPU, 32.00 GiB) │             │ 10.156.0.1  │ 35.207.77.101 │ RUNNING │
└─────────────┴────────────────┴─────────────────────────────┴─────────────┴─────────────┴───────────────┴─────────┘

In this example, the external IP address is 35.207.77.101.

In case you want to see only the IP address, use this command instead:

gcloud compute instances list --filter="name=my-instance" --format "get(networkInterfaces[0].accessConfigs[0].natIP)"

Example output:

35.207.77.101

In order to see only the internal IP address (accessible only from Google Cloud), use

gcloud compute instances list --filter="name=my-instance" --format "get(networkInterfaces[0].networkIP)"

In the linux shell, the result of this command can easily be used as input to other commands. For example, to ping my-instance, use

ping $(gcloud compute instances list --filter="name=katc-main" --format "get(networkInterfaces[0].accessConfigs[0].natIP)")

Also see our related post How to find zone of Google Cloud VM instance on command line

In order to see what other information about instances you can see in a similar fashion, use

gcloud compute instances list --filter="name=my-instance" --format "text"