GCE Instance Boot Disk Image Name

Question

I wonder if someone can help.

I have some running instances. I'd like to get the image name of an instance boot disk (e.g., debian-10-buster-v20200618). It shows in the GCP console but neither of these commands fetch it:

gcloud compute instances list gcloud compute instances list --format=json 

Is there a way for GCloud to access this value? Could something (JS?) go directly to an API? Perhaps accessing the image family would be more useful but that probably needs to be derived from the image name. Could be that I'm missing something obvious :/

Any thoughts or suggestions gratefully received!

Rik

Solution Create an instance

gcloud compute instances create instance-1 --zone=europe-west1-b 

Determine the image on which it was based

gcloud compute disks describe instance-1 --zone=europe-west1-b --format=json | jq -r .sourceImage 

(I've used JQ to filter down the response; W_B -- many thanks BTW -- uses Awk)

Answer 1

You can list disks with [gcloud compute disks list][1].

The disk name is usually same as the instance name.

The name you provided (debian-10-buster-v20200618) looks more like an image name of the disk. You can use gcloud compute images list in the same way as disks list.

If you want just the first column displayed and sorted by nanme then you can do gcloud compute disks list --sort-by=NAME | awk '{print $1}'.

This is just an example of what you can do - if you specify your desired output then I can edit my answer.

Here's how to use AWK to process any text output and make it more suited for your needs.

If you specify what's you desired output of this command I will edit the question and post exact command.

If the sorting capabilities of the gcloud arent enough you can use built in sort command.

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To get a source image name which VM's disk was created from use gcloud compute disks describe yourinstancename --zone=myzone | grep image.

The result will look simillar to this: https://www.googleapis.com/compute/v1/projects/windows-cloud/global/images/windows-server-2012-r2-dc-v20200609

You can further use AWK to "tidy up" the results and get just the image name (for scripting etc).