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Comment by thesandlord | Hacker News Reader

(I work for Google Cloud)

If you want to learn more about Cloud Shell, the marketing page is here: https://cloud.google.com/shell/

Cloud Shell is one of my favorite things about GCP. A lot of dev tools (Docker, Python/Go/Node/Ruby/Java/.Net, etc) are pre-installed, you can test "localhost" servers with the preview feature, there is a built in file editor (based on the open source Orion project), etc. And it's all free!

This link will directly open the shell in a full page, and I'm not sure it will work unless you have set up your GCP account before. It's really not designed to be opened this way, I recommend opening it from the GCP console and then making it full screen if your want.

Also note: Cloud Shell gives you a persistent 5GB /home Directory, but every other folder is reset after a while. If you want to add your own binaries, I'd recommend adding home to your path and installing them there.

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Can I give you a tidbit of feedback?

If the instance is ephemeral, I need to manage everything in HOME and that's fine. For Python, that basically means using Virtualenv. That works fine at the moment for python 2.7, but 3.x on Debian requires the package python3-venv, which is not installed by default - and sure enough, it's missing in Cloud Shell.

It's a bit annoying having to apt-get install python3-venv every time. Any chance it could be preinstalled? It's such an essential tool for modern python development...

You can tell virtualenv to use an arbitrary python interpreter, even pypy, using `--python=/path/to/python/interpreter`.

But then I have to install the virtualenv script in every dev environment, when really the stdlib version is perfectly fine and requires no extra hacks.

It's an annoyance specific to Debian and to this day I'm not sure I understand the rationale for splitting it out of the main python3 package.

I'm building python 3.6.4 from source and stashing it in $HOME. No errors so far.

EDIT: Worked great!

    @cloudshell:~/python3/bin$ ./ipython3
    Python 3.6.4 (default, Jan 28 2018, 00:39:17)
    Type 'copyright', 'credits' or 'license' for more information
    IPython 6.2.1 -- An enhanced Interactive Python. Type '?' for help.
    In [1]: from __future__ import braces
      File "<ipython-input-1-6d5c5b2f0daf>", line 1
        from __future__ import braces
                                     ^
    SyntaxError: not a chance

Will Google record the input from the users and/or analyze it?

No. https://cloud.google.com/terms/data-processing-terms

I cannot confirm your answer.

In "6. Data Deletion" Google assures that data will be delete in a reasonable fashion upon request or on expiry of the term. Google reserves the right to share the data with other entities in "11.2 Information about Subprocessors" which are listed in [0]. I assume that the data will also be deleted from the subprocessors. It is also stated that the function is explained, yet an exhaustive explanation is missing. The most informative I can find is that they "provide customer and technical support" besides some non-exclusive examples of activities.

Also, I see no part that ensures Google won't analyze the data, like for example to train neural networks. Could you point me to it?

[0] https://cloud.google.com/terms/subprocessors

It is one of a few tunnels that things like Websense can't recognize. Well known to consultants stranded on networks heavily controlled by their F500 clients.

Thanks for the summary of Cloud Shell, I was not previously aware of it.

Any idea why Apache and Gradle are installed in the root directory? Normally, these would be in `opt` or some such.

Most likely because of this [0]

> any modifications that you made to it outside your $HOME are lost.

[0] https://cloud.google.com/shell/docs/limitations#custom_insta...

Well, that applies to the user, not to whoever spun the distro to begin with. Google could have put them wherever they wanted.

Anyway, not a huge deal, just a bit odd. And evoking my OCD: ...must...keep...clean...root.

Any chance of getting Haskell on there?

I install the GHC everytime I want to use haskell on the Cloud Shell. It takes literaly like 30 seconds.

The Cloud Shell is a Debian Stretch container, so it's easy to install packages as you will. If you want them to be persistent install them on your home folder and add the route to your env vars.

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