Authenticate Google Cloud In Docker Without Getting Your Creds Stolen
Avoid GCP 401 errors — and security concerns — by passing project credentials into your Docker image the right way.
Welcome to another edition of I couldn’t find this information using StackOverflow/Reddit/documentation so I need to brain dump a post about what I learned. With any luck, generations of engineers will benefit from this sacred knowledge.
In a previous story I wrote (ranted) about what influenced my dual-dev IDE strategy which involves a borderline-impractical combination of Jupyter Notebook (run through Vertex AI) and VS Code. I explained that Jupyter is typically my sandbox where I craft “rough drafts” of code and VS Code is both the testing ground and vehicle for committing the final product to GitHub.
In the past I’ve also shared that, in order to reduce the embarrassment (and credibility hit) associated with a failed deployment, I prefer to create clean virtual environments, usually using Pyenv, to facilitate a testing ground for my Python-based pipelines.
Recently, however, I’ve eschewed Pyenv in favor of a more data engineer (and software engineer)-oriented strategy: Testing code using Docker images.
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