Google Cloud Platform

If you are going to use any GCP resources for local development or plan to deploy Tide to the cloud, then you will have to install some prerequisites and get everything properly setup first.

Prerequisites

Create a new Cloud Project using the Cloud Console
Enable Billing on that project
Enable the Cloud SQL API
Enable App Engine
Create a service-account.json
Install Google Cloud SDK
Install gsutil

Service Account

Go to the Credentials section of your project in the Console. Click Create credentials and then click Service account key. For the Service account, select App Engine app default service account. Then click Create to generate and download the JSON service account key file to your local machine. Save the file as service-account.json in the projects root directory. We will use this file to connect to Google Cloud Platform services and API’s like Cloud Storage and Cloud SQL.

If App Engine app default service account is missing from the list of service accounts, then you haven’t activated App Engine for your project or it is still initializing.

Deploying to GCP is optional and not required for local development. In this section we’ve included some of the basic steps required to get setup on GCP.

Environment Variables

You are required to create an .env.gcp file in the project root. You should also add the correct values to the variables in the .env file only if you plan to deploy or test real GCP resources. However, the .env.gcp file makes deploying services to GCP a lot easier, since the .env.gcp file will override values in the .env file to update any YAML deployment files, but not environment variables.

These three variables are required for both local development and deployments to GCP.

Variable	Description
`GCP_PROJECT`	The unique ID of your Google project. Default is `tide-local`. Note: you must update this value if you plan to use any* GCP resources, for purely local development the default value will work as-is.*
`GCP_REGION`	The region where all your resources will be created. For example, `us-west1`.
`GCP_ZONE`	The preferred zone in your region that resources will be created, For example, `us-west1-a`.

Remember to add the region you end up using during the gcloud app create step on the Google App Engine page or you’ll be troubleshooting the reason things are not working for hours.