Is it possible to copy a directory from a Google Compute Engine instance to my local machine?

google-compute-engine gcloud
ThatBrianDude picture ThatBrianDude · Sep 21, 2017 · Viewed 8.1k times · Source

With scp I can add the -r flag to download directories to my local machine via ssh.

When using:

gcloud compute scp -r

it sais that '-r' is not an available option. Without -r I get an error saying that my source path is a directory. (Implying I can only download single files.)

Is there an equivalent to -r flag for gcloud compute scp command?

Answer

ThatBrianDude picture ThatBrianDude · Sep 21, 2017

Found it!

GCE offers an equivalent and it is --recurse.

My final command looks like this: 

gcloud compute scp --recurse username@instance_name:./* "local_dir"

For some reason I also needed the * behind the source folder to avoid some security issue.

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