Google Cloud Shell

Pirate under a boat

Google Cloud Shell is an interactive shell environment for Google Cloud Platform that makes it easy for you to learn and experiment with GCP and manage your projects and resources from your web browser. For more information, please take a look at the official documentation.

To open a terminal in the shell, just click on the correct button as shown below.

Open the Shell

After a few seconds, you should see a ready-to-use terminal appear. The entire workshop can be done from this terminal only, since it has almost all the required tools pre-installed.

However, we recommend you to enter the actual shell (and who knows, you may find your ghost in there) , so you have a more user-friendly interface.

The Terminal Shell

If you are more comfortable working with nano instead of vim for editing files in the terminal, you can switch the kubectl default editor by defining the KUBE_EDITOR environment variable, for example:

Λ\: $ export KUBE_EDITOR=nano

Clicking the showed button should bring you to another tab of your browser.

The Terminal in another tab

You can now open the file editor to have the full IDE.

The Google Cloud Shell

If you already used Atom or Visual Studio Code, this should look very familiar.

To upload/download files from your computer to the shell, just use the Right Click in the file explorer and click on either Upload Files … or Download.

Sail to next page ⛵