How to Port Forward Using the Gcloud SDK

Tue, Oct 5, 2021

A reference on how to forward ports with the Google Gcloud SDK.

1. A tunnel that creates a background listening port on locahost and releases the terminal

glcoud compute ssh <your-vm> \
    --project=<gcp project id> \
    --zone <gce vm zone> \
    -- -L 8888:localhost:8888 -N -q -f

Syntax	Comment
--	commands to supply to ssh
-L 8888:localhost:8888	local port forwarding. a port on my computer, localhost:8888 is redirected to port 8888 on destination
-N	Do not execute a remote command. This is useful for just forwarding ports (protocol version 2 only).
-q	Quiet mode. Causes most warning and diagnostic messages to be suppressed.
-f	Requests ssh to go to background just before command execution. Implies -n. . -n Redirects stdin from /dev/null (actually, prevents reading from stdin).