Where does gcloud store its defaults?

Question

Following this Quickstart I set a default project like this

$ gcloud config set project lfs258
Updated property [core/project].
$ gcloud config get-value project
lfs258

The project lfs258 doesn't exist on my GCP account, though, so I'm surprised that I could set it as the default. When I try to see where gcloud stores its defaults there is no .gcloud/ directory.

Where does gcloud store its defaults? kubectl stores them in .kube/config but I can't find a similar config file for gcloud.

Answer 1

To be more specific gcloud supports multiple configurations. Run

gcloud config configurations list

to see full list.

If user did not create configuration explicitly he/she gets configuartion named default, and as a result properties set via

gcloud config set ...

command will get stored in

~/.config/gcloud/configurations/config_default

If you create new configuration

gcloud config configurations create my_settings

then properties will be stored in

~/.config/gcloud/configurations/config_my_settings

Note as a user you should not care where they are stored, and if you need to programatically access them a better option is to run

gcloud config list --format=json

you can even access specific configuration (not just currently selected) by doing

gcloud config list --format=json --configuration=my_setting