Google Cloud CLI supports over 8,000 commands to provide complete management and control over nearly all Google Cloud services and products. The CLI also provides preview command sets for early access to pre-release Google Cloud products.

To assist with your local software development, the gcloud CLI provides data emulators for Bigtable, Cloud Datastore, Firestore, Spanner, and Pub/Sub for local development, testing, and validation. These simulate the service back ends to help you write client-side code more efficiently.

The gcloud CLI is also bundled with specialized sub-tools for working with BigQuery (the bq CLI), Cloud Storage (the gsutil CLI), and Kubernetes Clusters (the kubectl CLI) to provide precise and deep control over those respective products.

With bq, run BigQuery queries and manipulate datasets, tables, and entities. With gsutil, manage Storage buckets and objects, and with kubectl, deploy and manage Kubernetes container clusters.

For various serverless products, the gcloud CLI is the primary interface by which you upload code to run and generally support your development workflow. For example, for Cloud Function, you can use the CLI to describe or trigger a function, display its log entries, or deploy updates to it.

Use the help flag to access inline documentation or view quickstarts and how-to guides on the web. The CLI is also backed by detailed reference documentation. For some services such as Cloud Compute, the Cloud Console provides equivalent gcloud CLI commands so you can use a UI interface to build up complex command and flag combinations.

Download and initialize the latest version of Google Cloud CLI.

Download additional command-line components like bq, gsutil, kubectl, preview gcloud commands, or necessary dependencies.

A comprehensive, high-level look at the gcloud CLI, including its release levels, command structure, and important concepts.

Run gcloud commands from a script by utilizing features like prompt disabling and output filtering and formatting.

Learn how to install and configure gcloud CLI, then use it to perform some basic operations like creating VMs, networks, and using gsutil to perform operations.

When you script with gcloud CLI, you can run gcloud commands using scripts or other automations—for example, by using Bash scripts, or when using Jenkins to drive automation of Google Cloud tasks. Additionally, the gcloud command-line tool comes with the ability to filter and format command output to easily structure and extract information as well as combine multiple commands to manage your Google Cloud resources non-interactively.

gcloud CLI ships with various data and service emulators to simulate dataset availability and backend behaviors directly in your local environment. This way, you can code, inspect behavior, and iterate on how your software displays data or handles various responses.