Authenticate with gcloud

When using Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), you often need to authenticate your kubectl command-line tool with Google Cloud to manage your Kubernetes clusters. This is typically done using the gcloud command-line tool.

Install gcloud CLI

Install the SDK

brew install google-cloud-sdk

Add to shell configuration file

For me, this is adding to ~/.zshrc

source "$(brew --prefix)/share/google-cloud-sdk/path.zsh.inc"
source "$(brew --prefix)/share/google-cloud-sdk/completion.zsh.inc"

Then we can initialise gcloud init

Authenticate

Get credentials for the clusters in different projects (documentation):

• gcloud components install gke-gcloud-auth-plugin
• gcloud container clusters get-credentials [gcloud-project] --region=europe-west1
• kubectl get pods - (optional: testing it generally works)
• kubectl get nodes - (optional: testing it generally works)