Building Google Cloud Platform Solutions

The cbt command-line interface

Perhaps the easiest way to interact with Bigtable is using the cbt command-line interface. cbt is an open source Bigtable client written in Go and made available as part of the Google Cloud SDK. To install cbt, run the following command:

gcloud components install cbt

Once installed, we can begin interacting with our hello-bigtable instance. Looking back at our Datastore example with employees, we can do something similar with the following commands. First, create a new employees table:

cbt -instance hello-bigtable createtable employees

You can validate that the table has been created with the ls command:

cbt -instance hello-bigtable ls ... > employees

We can create a column family for our employee details like ...