How to use multiple service accounts with gcloud?

Question

I have two Google Cloud service accounts; one for each of my two projects.

# ACCOUNTS [email protected] [email protected] 

I can tell gcloud which account I need to use before executing a command:

gcloud set account [ACCOUNT] 

Question: Is there any way I can configure gcloud and gsutil so that they'll be used for operations performed in their respective project without me having to switch between these accounts manually all the time?

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I'm managing instances in one project and I upload/download files from buckets in another project. It becomes quite tedious to have to perform gcloud set_account [ACCOUNT] all the time in-between commands.

I need to be running long-running commands in both projects at the same time which causes me to think I will fall into a pit if I activate/de-activate the accounts used for these commands.

Perhaps my only option is to run google-cloud-sdk from two different Docker containers?

Answer 1

You have several options here:

• The Cloud SDK respects environment variables specifying properties. gcloud config set account is shorthand for gcloud config set core/account, so the corresponding property is CLOUDSDK_CORE_ACCOUNT.

  You can do something like:

  $ [email protected] gcloud ... $ [email protected] gcloud ... 

  Which should get you the result you're interested in.

• If you need more than one property changed, the Cloud SDK offers a named configuration abstraction. See the docs for full details, but you can run:

  $ gcloud config configurations create my-project1-config $ gcloud config configurations activate my-project1-config $ gcloud auth login  # or activate-service-account $ gcloud config set project project1  # and any other configuration you need to do $  $ gcloud config configurations create my-project2-config $ gcloud config configurations activate my-project2-config $ gcloud auth login  # or activate-service-account $ gcloud config set project project2  # and any other configuration you need to do $ $ CLOUDSDK_ACTIVE_CONFIG_NAME=my-project1-config gcloud ... $ CLOUDSDK_ACTIVE_CONFIG_NAME=my-project2-config gcloud ... 

• In the most extreme case, you can maintain separate Cloud SDK configuration directories. The default (on *nix) is ~/.config/gcloud:

  $ CLOUDSDK_CONFIG=/tmp/tmpconfig1 gcloud auth login $ CLOUDSDK_CONFIG=/tmp/tmpconfig2 gcloud auth login