Integrating Google Cloud Platform (GCP) with GitHub Actions Workflow

Google Cloud Platform (GCP) provides a robust and flexible infrastructure for deploying and scaling applications. When paired with the automation capabilities of GitHub Actions, it offers an efficient way to manage your CI/CD workflows. In this post, we will guide you through the process of integrating GCP with a GitHub Actions workflow.

Understanding the Use of GCP with GitHub Actions

Integrating GCP with GitHub Actions can streamline numerous tasks, such as deploying applications to GCP, managing GCP resources, and interacting with GCP services directly from your workflows. This can automate many aspects of your software delivery process, improving efficiency and reducing the risk of errors.

Setting Up GCP Integration in a GitHub Actions Workflow

Step 1: Configure GCP Credentials as Secrets

To interact with GCP, we need a service account key. Create a service account in the GCP console, assign it the necessary roles, and download the key as a JSON file.

Next, store this JSON key as a secret in your GitHub repository (Settings > Secrets > New repository secret). We will refer to this secret as GCP_SA_KEY.

Step 2: Use the Setup Gcloud CLI Action

The google-github-actions/setup-gcloud action allows us to authenticate and configure the Google Cloud CLI in our workflow.

name: GCP Integration

on: [push]

jobs:
  deploy:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest

    steps:
    - name: Checkout
      uses: actions/checkout@v2

    - name: Setup Gcloud CLI
      uses: google-github-actions/setup-gcloud@v0.2.1
      with:
        service_account_key: ${{ secrets.GCP_SA_KEY }}
        project_id: your-gcp-project-id
        export_default_credentials: true

name: GCP Integration

on: [push]

jobs:

deploy:

runs-on: ubuntu-latest

steps:

- name: Checkout

uses: actions/checkout@v2

- name: Setup Gcloud CLI

uses: google-github-actions/setup-gcloud@v0.2.1

with:

service_account_key: ${{ secrets.GCP_SA_KEY }}

project_id: your-gcp-project-id

export_default_credentials: true

Step 3: Interact with GCP Resources

With the Google Cloud CLI set up, we can interact with GCP resources. For example, to list all compute instances in your GCP project, you can do:

    - name: List Compute Instances
      run: gcloud compute instances list

1 2	- name: List Compute Instances run: gcloud compute instances list

Conclusion

Integrating GCP with GitHub Actions workflows offers powerful automation capabilities that can improve your software development process. Be sure to handle your GCP service account keys securely by storing them as GitHub secrets.