Google Cloud Platform Cookbook

Creating and configuring a GCE instance

After creating the start up script, follow these steps:

1. With the start up script ready, we can create an instance using the gcloud command:

$ gcloud compute instances create mysite-instance \
--image-family=debian-8 \
--image-project=debian-cloud \
--machine-type=g1-small \
--scopes userinfo-email,cloud-platform \
--metadata-from-file startup-script=./startup-script.sh \
--zone us-east1-c \
--tags mysite-server 

2. You can check the progress of the instance creation using the following command:

$ gcloud compute instances get-serial-port-output \mysite-instance --zone us-east1-c

3. Create a firewall rule to allow access to port 3000 to the instance:

$ gcloud compute firewall-rules create default-allow-http-3000 ...