Temporarily activate `gcloud` configurations with `CLOUDSDK_ACTIVE_CONFIG_NAME`
Table of Contents
You can use CLOUDSDK_ACTIVE_CONFIG_NAME to switch between multiple configurations temporarily.
gcloud config for one project
Google Cloud SDK (a.k.a. gcloud) can be configured via various config options, such as gcloud config set project my-gcp-project-123 (set the default Google Cloud project name to my-gcp-project-123) and gcloud config set run/region asia-northeast1 (set the default deploy region of Cloud Run to asia-northeast1 that is Tokyo region).
But when you need to handle multiple Google Cloud projects or personal/work projects, you have to manage a set of configs.
gcloud config configurations for a set of configs
To switch a set of gcloud config, Google Cloud SDK has a useful grouping feature called configurations and we can switch between one set of config group and another one.
You can create a configurations with gcloud config configurations sub-subcommand and can switch a configurations by gcloud config configurations activate <configurations-name>.
Prevent mistake to run command against wrong Google Cloud project
However, I found out that sometimes I forgot to switch back to the previous project and I was about to run a wrong command against different project. That can cause an unwanted incident.
To mitigate the risk of such an incident, you can use a special environment variable CLOUDSDK_ACTIVE_CONFIG_NAME so that the specified configurations only within the terminal. If you use the terminal in your editor and the editor has one window for one project, it becomes rare to run wrong gcloud command on the other project.