linuxkit/docs/gcp.md

Using LinuxKit on Google Cloud Platform (GCP)

This is a quick guide to run LinuxKit on GCP. A lot of internal development and CI has used Google Cloud so the support is very good; other platforms will have similar support soon.

Setup

You have two choices for authentication with Google Cloud

1. You can use Application Default Credentials
2. You can use a Service Account

Application Default Credentials

You need the Google Cloud SDK installed. Either install it from the URL or view brew (on a Mac):

brew tap caskroom/cask
brew cask install google-cloud-sdk

Or via source code:

wget https://dl.google.com/dl/cloudsdk/channels/rapid/downloads/google-cloud-sdk-151.0.0-darwin-x86_64.tar.gz
tar xzvf google-cloud-sdk-151.0.0-darwin-x86_64.tar.gz
./google-cloud-sdk/install.sh

Then, set up some environment variables (adjust as needed) and login:

export CLOUDSDK_CORE_PROJECT=<GCP project>
export CLOUDSDK_COMPUTE_ZONE=europe-west1-d
gcloud auth login

The authentication will redirect to a browser with Google login.

Also authenticate local applications with

gcloud auth application-default login

Service Account

You can use this guide to create a Service Account.

Make sure to download the credentials in JSON format and store them somewhere safe.

Build an image

Add a gcp output line to your yaml config, see the example in examples/gcp.yml.

Then do moby build myfile.yml

This will create a local myfile.img.tar.gz compressed image file, upload it to the specified bucket, and create a bootable image.

Create an instance and connect to it

With the image created, we can now create an instance and connect to the serial port.

moby run gcp -project myproject-1234 myfile