How do I configure Google BigQuery command line tool to use a Service Account?

Question

I've created a service account using the Google API Console and wish to use this service account with the Google BigQuery CLI (bq) tool.

I've been using the command line tool to successfully access the BigQuery service using my valid OAuth2 credentials in ~/.bigquery.v2.token, however I can't seem to find any documentation on how to modify this file (or otherwise configure the tool) to use a service account instead.

Here is my current .bigquery.v2.token file

{
    "_module": "oauth2client.client",
    "_class": "OAuth2Credentials",
    "access_token": "--my-access-token--",
    "token_uri": "https://accounts.google.com/o/oauth2/token",
    "invalid": false,
    "client_id": "--my-client-id--.apps.googleusercontent.com",
    "id_token": null,
    "client_secret": "--my-client-secret--",
    "token_expiry": "2012-11-06T15:57:12Z",
    "refresh_token": "--my-refresh-token--",
    "user_agent": "bq/2.0"
}

My other file: ~/.bigqueryrc generally looks like this:

project_id = --my-project-id--
credential_file = ~/.bigquery.v2.token

I've tried setting the credential_file paramater to the .p12 private key file for my service account but with no luck, it gives me back the following error

******************************************************************
** No OAuth2 credentials found, beginning authorization process **
******************************************************************

And asks me to go to a link in my browser to set up my OAuth2 credentials again.

The command line tools' initial configuration option "init":

bq help init

displays no helpful information about how to set up this tool to use a service account.

Answer 1

1.) Tell gcloud to authenticate as your service account

gcloud auth activate-service-account \
[email protected] \
--key-file=/path/key.json \
--project=testproject

2.) Run a bq command as you would with your user account

# ex: bq query
bq query --use_legacy_sql=false 'SELECT CURRENT_DATE()'

3. optional) Revert gcloud authentication to your user account

gcloud config set account [email protected]

3a. optional) See who gcloud uses for authentication

gcloud auth list