`gcloud compute copy-files`: permission denied when copying files

Question

I'm having a hard time copying files over to my Google Compute Engine. I am using an Ubuntu server on Google Compute Engine.

I'm doing this from my OS X terminal and I am already authorized using gcloud.

local:$ gcloud compute copy-files /Users/Bryan/Documents/Websites/gce/index.php example-instance:/var/www/html --zone us-central1-a
Warning: Permanently added '<IP>' (RSA) to the list of known hosts.
scp: /var/www/html/index.php: Permission denied
ERROR: (gcloud.compute.copy-files) [/usr/bin/scp] exited with return code [1].

Answer 1

insert root@ before the instance name:

local:$ gcloud compute copy-files /Users/Bryan/Documents/Websites/gce/index.php root@example-instance:/var/www/html --zone us-central1-a

Answer 2

The reason this doesn't work is that your username does not have permissions on the GCE VM instance and so cannot write to /var/www/html/.

Note that since this question is about Google Compute Engine VMs, you cannot SSH directly to a VM as root, nor can you copy files directly as root, for the same reason: gcloud compute copy-files uses scp which relies on ssh for authentication.

Possible solutions:

1. (also suggested by Faizan in the comments) this solution will require two steps every time

   1. use gcloud compute copy-files to transfer files/directories where your user can write to, e.g., /tmp or /home/$USER

   2. login to the GCE VM via gcloud compute ssh or via the SSH button on the console and copy using sudo to get proper permissions:

      # note: sample command; adjust paths appropriately

      sudo cp -r $HOME/html/* /var/www/html

2. this solution is one step with some prior prep work:

   1. one-time setup: give your username write access to /var/www/html directly; this can be done in several ways; here's one approach:

      # make the HTML directory owned by current user, recursively

      sudo chown -R $USER /var/www/html

   2. now you can run the copy in one step:

      gcloud compute copy-files /Users/Bryan/Documents/Websites/gce/index.php example-instance:/var/www/html --zone us-central1-a

Answer 3

I use a bash script to copy from my local machine to writable directory on the remote GCE machine; then using ssh move the files.

SRC="/cygdrive/d/mysourcedir"
TEMP="~/incoming"
DEST="/var/my-disk1/my/target/dir"

You also need to set GCE_USER and GCE_INSTANCE

echo "=== Pushing data from $SRC to $DEST in two simple steps"
echo "=== 1) Copy to a writable temp directoy in user home"
gcloud compute copy-files "$SRC"/*.* "${GCE_USER}@${GCE_INSTANCE}:$TEMP"
echo "=== 2) Move with 'sudo' to destination"
gcloud compute ssh ${GCE_USER}@${GCE_INSTANCE} --command "sudo mv $TEMP/*.* $DEST" 

In my case I don't want to chown the target dir as this causes other problems with other scripts ...