Google Cloud Platform for Developers

Modifying API responses

Metadata API behavior can be modified using query parameters. To have the API return all nested values recursively, simply provide the ?recursive=true query parameter. To specify the response format as either plain text or JSON, provide the ?alt=<text|json> query parameter. This makes it possible to retrieve an instance's entire metadata using the following command:

gcloud compute ssh --zone=us-east1-b hello-gce --command \  'curl -s -H "Metadata-Flavor: Google" \ "http://metadata.google.internal/computeMetadata/v1/instance/?recursive=true&alt=json"' \  | python -m json.tool