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I use the method mentioned in this excellent answer https://stackoverflow.com/a/49515502/10690958 to connect to Google Cloud Shell via ssh on my ubuntu workstation. Occasionally, I need to enable "boost-mode". In that case, I currently have to open the Cloud Shell via firefox (https://console.cloud.google.com/cloudshell/editor?shellonly=true), then login and enable boost mode. After that I can close firefox, and use the gcloud method to access the cloud shell VM in boost mode.

I would like to do this (access boost-mode) purely through the gcloud cli, since using the browser is quite cumbersome.

The official docs dont mention any method of enabling boost mode via gcloud There seem to be only three options i.e. ssh/scp/sshfs via gcloud alpha cloud-shell. Is there perhaps a way to enable this via some configuration option?

thanks

Pablo Almécija Rodríguez
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grill05
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2 Answers2

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There does not seem to be any option to enable the boost mode from either the v1 or v1alpha1 versions of the Cloud Shell API (both versions undocumented).

The gcloud command actually uses the API to get the status of your Cloud Shell environment, which contains information about how to connect through SSH, updates the SSH keys if needed, and then connects using that info (use gcloud alpha cloud-shell ssh --log-http if you want to check it by yourself).

As far as I can see, when you click the "Boost mode" button, the browser makes a call to https://ssh.cloud.google.com/devshell?boost=true&forceNewVm=true (and some more parameters), but I can't make it work on the command line, so I'm guessing it's doing some other stuff that I can't identify.

If you need this for your workflow, you could raise a feature request on Google's issue tracker.

Jofre
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It is now possible to access the Cloud Shell in boost mode from the CLI with this command: gcloud alpha cloud-shell ssh --boosted. Other possible arguments are documented here. Just a warning: the first time I tried that my home directory became unreadable and started returning "Input/output error", logging out and in again fixed the issue.

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    Interestingly, one year later, this option has been removed. – Jofre Apr 13 '21 at 08:10
  • There is follow-up discussion of this here... https://stackoverflow.com/questions/64811547/google-cloud-platform-gcp-cloud-shell-boost-feature-missing?rq=1 – Tom Apr 21 '21 at 14:08