Handle multiple Google Cloud Shell using Windows Terminal
Windows Terminal is a Microsoft open source project announced in May 2019. A first stable version was released in May 2020; I am guilty of overlooking it in these months as a Windows-based user, it really is a helpful tool with a high customizable interface.
Working for Accenture Google Business Group it is very common to have my day-by-day activities splitted in several GCP projects and also in different Google accounts for customers security restrictions.
Terminal offers an interesting feature: profiles.
Terminal will provide, out of the box, some dynamically generated profiles:
- Cmd prompt
- Windows Powershell
- Azure Cloud Shell
- Any WSL you have installed in your Windows
But it also let you define different profiles that you can launch directly from an easy access pick-list:
As you can see I am able to define several Google Cloud Shell profiles for several projects/accounts. I find this to be very handy, let’s see how to do it.
Requirements
- Windows 10 1903 (build 18362) or later
- Windows Terminal
- Google Cloud SDK
- Ubuntu WSL (not really it’s just my preference :) )
Steps
Login to your account
Open WSL and login to your google account:
gcloud auth login {user_email}Follow the link in the browser and provide the verification code to the prompt.
Define a switching script
Let’s define a shell script to switch account/project using script parameters and launch a ssh session towards Google Cloud Shell using Google Cloud SDK:
#!/bin/bash
gcloud auth login $1
gcloud config set project $2gcloud cloud-shell ssh
Save it to ~ folder as set-gcloud-env.sh
Generate a guid
Open a Windows Powershell and use the command:
[guid]::NewGuid()Save the result for next step.
Define Terminal profile
Open settings from the pick-list of Terminal, it will lead to a setting.json file, let’s add a new element with the required attributes into profiles.list section of the json object:
{"guid": "{{guid_generated}}","name": "{client} {project_name}","commandline": "wsl ~/set-gcloud-env.sh {user_email} {project_name}","hidden": false}
Save settings.json, you don’t need to restart Terminal.
Result
Click on the profile created in the last step from the pick-list:
We successfully created a working Google Cloud Shell profile !
The first connection will prompt for a passphrase generating personal ssh keys and publishing the public key to the Google Cloud Shell, it will also modify your ~/.ssh/known_hosts .
Repeat the steps for any profile needed.
Customization
Terminal provide a lot of customizable fancy attributes such as:
- icon
- tabColor
- acrylicOpacity
- …
You can find documentation on customizable attributes here .
NB
As in browser sessions, Google Cloud will retain your provisioned machine if inactive for some time. In this case you will need to restart the profile using the pick-list in order to request a new session.
Ciao! 👋
AL
