In the previous article Temporarily activate gcloud configurations with CLOUDSDK_ACTIVE_CONFIG_NAME, I explained how we can temporarily activate the gcloud configurations. In this post, I will enhance this with fzf for the interactive search.

Note that I’m using 🐟 fish shell.

TL;DR

> alias gcloud-config "export CLOUDSDK_ACTIVE_CONFIG_NAME=(FZF_DEFAULT_COMMAND=\"gcloud config configurations list --format='get(name)'\" fzf --ansi --no-preview)"

Seeking kubens usability

I’m using kubens’s fzf support for several years. kubens is accompanied by kubectx, a very useful tool when switching a Kubernetes context and namespace easily. And with fzf, we can choose the target object from many candidates quickly. kubens can be used by just typing k ns (I installed another k + * -> kubectl *** expansion shell scripts here) and a few characters, then type the return key.

So I wanted to use the same mechanism for gcloud configurations instead of using searching the shell command history with Ctrl+R and rewriting the configurations name every time.

I went a shortcut to see what kubens does instead of reading fzf documentation. I found out this is just a bash script instead golang program. After all, only code I needed was one statement here:

  choice="$(_KUBECTX_FORCE_COLOR=1 \
    FZF_DEFAULT_COMMAND="${SELF_CMD}" \
    fzf --ansi --no-preview || true)"

kubectx/kubens at master · ahmetb/kubectx

By the way, kubens was written by Ahmet Alp Balkan, who was working at Google Cloud and provided a lot of excellent explanations about GKE and Cloud Run. I’ve learned a lot from the explanations. I recommend to read the blog articles.

Constructing command

So we can specify fzf’s default command like this:

> FZF_DEFAULT_COMMAND=ls fzf --ansi --no-preview

Then, fzf takes the output of the specified command (ls here) and we can choose the candidates.

Next, let’s find a way to list the existing gcloud configurations list without additional information:

> gcloud config configurations list
NAME               IS_ACTIVE  ACCOUNT                       PROJECT                   COMPUTE_DEFAULT_ZONE  COMPUTE_DEFAULT_REGION
cloud-code         False
default            False      shuuji3@gmail.com             shuuji3                   asia-east1-b          asia-east1
shuuji3            False      shuuji3@gmail.com             shuuji3                   asia-northeast1-a     asia-northeast1

This is the starting point. We want to list only the name of the configurations without any headers. After several attempts, I found get(<field-name>) was what we need.

> gcloud config configurations list --format='get(name)'
cloud-code
default
shuuji3
...

Let’s specify as the fzf’s default command:

> FZF_DEFAULT_COMMAND=(gcloud config configurations list --format='get(name)') fzf --ansi --no-preview

Note that fzf returns as an output. So we can set it to the variable.

> export CLOUDSDK_ACTIVE_CONFIG_NAME=(FZF_DEFAULT_COMMAND="gcloud config configurations list --format='get(name)'" fzf --ansi --no-preview)

Usage example

You can also define this command as a shell alias:

> alias gcloud-config "export CLOUDSDK_ACTIVE_CONFIG_NAME=(FZF_DEFAULT_COMMAND=\"gcloud config configurations list --format='get(name)'\" fzf --ansi --no-preview)"

Then, you can show all the candidates with gcloud-config command in this case:

  shuuji3
  *****************
  *****************
  *****************
  *****************
  *****************
  default
> cloud-code
  8/8 ──────────────────────────────────
>

If you type a few characters, you can quickly filter the candidates!

> default
  1/8 ──────────────────────────────────
> def

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