Can I automate `gcloud auth login`?

I am unable to non-interactively activate my Google Cloud service account; even after reading several SO threads.

Creating a service account

gcloud iam service-accounts create my-awesome-acct ...

Creating a role for the service account

gcloud iam roles create AwesomeRole \ --permissions storage.objects.create,storage.objects.delete ....

Generating the keys

gcloud iam service-accounts keys create ~/awesome-key.json ...

Activating the service account

gcloud auth activate-service-account my-awesome-acct ~/awesome-key.json

My Issue

Even after following the above steps, when I run gsutil ... commands, I still get the error message:

$ gsutil cp my_file.tgz gs://my_bucket

  Copying file://my_file.tgz [Content-Type=application/x-tar]...
  Your credentials are invalid. Please run

  $ gcloud auth login

The only way I could get this to work is to actually run gcloud auth login and allow the authentication in a web browser.

Am I doing something wrong? Or is this intended for every service account?

Solution

I'm going to answer my own question here.

My Solution

Instead of using gsutil, I decided to use the Google Cloud Client Libraries.

What I did:

gsutil cp my_file.tgz gs://my_bucket

What I am doing now:

from gcloud import storage

# key file is located in my current directory
os.environ.get('GOOGLE_APPLICATION_CREDENTIALS', 'gcloud-auth.json')

client = storage.Client()
bucket = client.get_bucket("my_bucket")
blob = bucket.blob("my_file.tgz")
blob.upload_from_filename("my_file.tgz")

Hindsight 20/20

After getting the above solution working, it seems if I also set the environment variable, GOOGLE_APPLICATION_CREDENTIALS, my gsutil should've worked too. (untested)