use gcloud with Jenkins

Question

I\'ve been trying to write a script that polls Google Cloud Storage periodically. This works fine when I run it normally, but if I include it as a build step in Jenkins, it give

Answer 1

Your best bet is probably to use a "service account" to authenticate gcloud/gsutil with the GCS service. The major steps are to use generate a JSON-formated private key following the instructions here:

https://cloud.google.com/storage/docs/authentication#service_accounts

Copy that key to a place where the Jenkins user can read it, and as the Jenkins user run

gcloud auth activate-service-account ...

(See https://cloud.google.com/storage/docs/authentication#service_accounts). Note that support for JSON key files is pretty new and you'll need an up-to-date gcloud release.

From there your Jenkins process should be able to access GCS as usual.

The key file should have the following format:

{
  "private_key_id": "XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX",
  "private_key": "-----BEGIN PRIVATE KEY-----\n ...  \n-----END PRIVATE KEY-----\n",
  "client_email": "...@developer.gserviceaccount.com",
  "client_id": "..."
  "type": "service_account"
}