I had previously been using the gcutil command. But I cheated a little with the one liner promise to get the new tool, gcloud, installed:
curl https://dl.google.com/dl/cloudsdk/release/install_google_cloud_sdk.bash | bash ; unzip google-cloud-sdk.zip ; ./google-cloud-sdk/install.sh
The installation shell script is interactive and will ask if you want to update your bash profile. Once run, kill your terminal app and the new invocation will allow you to log into App Engine using the gcloud command followed by auth and then login:
gcloud auth login
Provided you’re logged into Google using your default browser, you’ll then be prompted to Accept the federation. Click Accept.
The gcloud command can then be used to check your account name:
gcloud config list
To then set a project as active to manage it, use the set option (or unset to not manage it any longer:
gcloud config set project kryptedmuncas
You can then use components, sql or interactive verbs to connect to and manage instances. Each of these commands are interfacing with the API, so if you ever find that you’ve exceeded what this simple command provides for, you can always hit the API directly as well. I found that the interactive command was my favorite as I could figure out what limitations I had using interactive and then try and figure out how to accomplish tasks with commands from there.