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One PowerShell cmdlet to manage both Windows and Linux resources — no kidding!

November 29, 2016
Quoc Truong

Software Engineer

If you're managing Google Cloud Platform (GCP) resources from the command line on Windows, chances are you’re using our Cloud Tools for PowerShell. Thanks to PowerShell’s powerful scripting environment, including its ability to pipeline objects, you can efficiently author complex scripts to automate and manipulate your GCP resources.

However, PowerShell has historically only been available on Windows. So even though you had an uber-sophisticated PowerShell script to set up and monitor multiple Google Compute Engines and Google Cloud SQL instances, if you wanted to run it on Linux, you would have had to rewrite it in bash!

Fortunately, Microsoft recently released an alpha version of PowerShell that works on both OS X and Ubuntu, and we built a .NET Core version of our Tools on top of it. Thanks to that, you don’t have to rewrite your Google Cloud PowerShell scripts anymore just to make them work on Mac or Linux machines.

To preview the bits, you'll have to:

  1. Install Google Cloud SDK and initialize it.
  2. Install PowerShell.
  3. Download and unzip Cross-Platform Cloud Tools for PowerShell bits.

Now, from your Linux or OS X terminal, check out the following commands:

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If running GCP PowerShell cmdlets on Linux interests you, be sure to check out the post on how to run an ASP.NET Core app on Linux using Docker and Kubernetes. Because one thing is for certain — Google Cloud Platform is rapidly becoming a great place to run — and manage — Linux as well as Windows apps.

Happy scripting!

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