Difference Between The Commands "Gcloud Compute Ssh" and "Ssh"

Difference between the commands gcloud compute ssh and ssh

gcloud compute ssh installs the key pair as ~/.ssh/google_compute_engine[.pub]. ssh uses ~/.ssh/identity[.pub] by default.

You can either copy the google key pair to the default name:

$ cp ~/.ssh/google_compute_engine ~/.ssh/identity
$ cp ~/.ssh/google_compute_engine.pub ~/.ssh/identity.pub

or you can just specify the private key to use when you invoke ssh:

$ ssh -i ~/.ssh/google_compute_engine instance_name

gcloud compute ssh and gcloud compute copy-files return code propagation

It appears as though copy-files does ignore the return code of scp. I've filed an internal feature request to propagate it correctly (gcloud compute ssh does pass through the return code).

In the meantime, you can use the --dry-run flag with gcloud compute ssh and gcloud compute copy-files to see the equivalent scp/ssh command lines, and call those directly.

How to use autossh with google compute (`gcloud compute ssh`)

A replacement for the command line

Here is the two commands that allow you to use autossh:

gcloud compute config-ssh
autossh -M9042 mymachine.myzone.myproject 

In my opinion, this is the easiest way to do it. The first line export the ssh key and configuration of your machines, and the second just use this alias.

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More on ssh configuration

This also allow you to use the shortcut mymachine.myzone.myproject for scp, ssh, and all ssh related tools. Indeed, the list of your machines are exported in your ~/.ssh/config.
This is a list of aliases you can also configure by hand.

For more information on gcloud's config-ssh, you can refer to the official documentation.

Notice that some shell environment will provide you with ssh command autocompletion, which is really helpful when it comme to remembering the name of your machines. Here is a reference for zsh.

Is there a way to execute commands remotely using gcloud compute ssh utility

As long as you can ssh onto the instance, you should be able to:

gcloud compute ssh .... --command="bash -s" <<EOF
echo "Hello Freddie"
ls -l
EOF

You can test this (thanks to gcloud consistency using Cloud Shell):

gcloud alpha cloud-shell ssh --command="bash -s" <<EOF
echo "Hello Freddie"
ls
EOF

NOTE you may not need the -s but I think it's preferred

Yields:

Automatic authentication with GCP CLI tools in Cloud Shell is disabled. To enable, please rerun command with `--authorize-session` flag.
Hello Freddie
Projects
README-cloudshell.txt -> /google/devshell/README-cloudshell.txt
stackoverflow

gcloud compute execute command remotely

Try:

$ gcloud compute ssh --zone ZONE INSTANCE -- 'cd /tmp && python some.py'

From gcloud compute ssh --help:

 [-- IMPLEMENTATION-ARGS ...]
    Flags and positionals passed to the underlying ssh implementation.

    The '--' argument must be specified between gcloud specific args on the
    left and IMPLEMENTATION-ARGS on the right. Example:

        $ gcloud compute ssh example-instance --zone us-central1-a -- -vvv \
            -L 80:%INSTANCE%:80

Google Compute Engine VM - set up SSH tunnel through Python using google cloud API?

As clarified by John in the comments; the API is not meant for this task. Instead, I was able to use the sshtunnel library to simply replicate the behavior of the gcloud command:

from sshtunnel import SSHTunnelForwarder

server = SSHTunnelForwarder(
    "<server_ip>",
    ssh_username="<username>",
    local_bind_address=("0.0.0.0", 5000),
    remote_bind_address=("0.0.0.0", 5000),
)

server.start()

print(server.local_bind_port)  # show assigned local port -> 5000
print(server.is_active) # -> True

# Communicate with the server...

server.stop()

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