In today's DevOps landscape, automating tasks and deployments is essential for efficiency and reliability. One powerful way to achieve this is by leveraging GitHub Actions to connect with Google Cloud Platform (GCP) using the gcloud CLI. In this post, I'll walk you through setting up a GitHub Action workflow to use the gcloud CLI, allowing you to perform various tasks in GCP directly from your GitHub repository.

Prerequisites

1. Google Cloud Account: You need access to GCP and sufficient permissions to perform actions, such as deploying applications or managing resources.

2. GitHub Repository: Ensure you have a repository where you want to set up the workflow.

3. gcloud CLI: Familiarity with the gcloud CLI is helpful, but not required, as we'll cover the basic commands needed.

Step 1: Set Up a Service Account in GCP

First, create a service account in your Google Cloud project with the necessary permissions:

1. Navigate to the IAM & Admin section in the Google Cloud Console.

2. Select Service Accounts and create a new service account.

3. Assign the necessary roles for the actions you wish to automate. For example, you might need roles such as roles/storage.admin for Cloud Storage tasks or roles/compute.admin for Compute Engine tasks.

4. Generate a JSON key for the service account and download it. You'll use this key to authenticate in your GitHub Actions workflow.

Step 2: Store Service Account Credentials in GitHub Secrets

1. Go to your GitHub repository.

2. Navigate to Settings > Secrets and variables > Actions.

3. Click on New repository secret.

4. Add a new secret with the name GCP_SERVICE_ACCOUNT_KEY.

5. Copy the content of the JSON key file and paste it as the secret value.

Step 3: Create Your GitHub Action Workflow

Create a GitHub Actions workflow file in your repository. Here’s an example configuration:

name: GCP Deployment

on:
  push:
    branches:
      - main

jobs:
  deploy:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest

    steps:
    - name: Checkout repository
      uses: actions/checkout@v3

    - id: 'auth'
      uses: 'google-github-actions/auth@v2'
      with:
        credentials_json: '${{ secrets.GCP_SERVICE_ACCOUNT_KEY }}'

    - name: 'Set up Cloud SDK'
      uses: 'google-github-actions/setup-gcloud@v2'

    - name: 'Use gcloud CLI'
      run: 'gcloud info'

Explanation

• The auth action sets Application Default Credentials, then the setup-gcloud action references these credentials to configure gcloud credentials. The setup-gcloud action installs the Cloud SDK (gcloud).

Step 4: Test and Validate

Commit and push your changes to your GitHub repository. Navigate to the Actions tab to see the workflow run and validate the output. Make sure that all steps are completed successfully and that the desired actions are performed in your GCP environment.