Connect to a Compute Engine instance directly with ssh • Java Bien!

On Compute Engine it’s very simple to connect to an instance using the gcutil command line tool:

gcutil --project=my_project ssh my_instance

But can we connect directly with ssh? That’s useful if, say, you need to push to a git repository hosted on that instance. Yes it’s easy too. Here’s the full command:

ssh -o UserKnownHostsFile=/dev/null -o CheckHostIP=no -o StrictHostKeyChecking=no -i $HOME/.ssh/google_compute_engine -A -p 22 $USER@$IP_OF_INSTANCE

I didn’t make it out, it’s printed when I run gcutil ssh my_instance

If, like me, you can barely remember your own phone number, time has come to dump all these flags to a .ssh/config file:

Host nickname
    HostName $IP_OF_INSTANCE
    Port 22
    User $USER
    UserKnownHostsFile /dev/null
    CheckHostIP no
    StrictHostKeyChecking no
    IdentityFile ~/.ssh/google_compute_engine

And now it’s as simple as:

ssh nickname