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gcloud

gcloud list instances in managed group sorted by creation time

I need to get the oldest instance from an instance group. I am using the following command:

gcloud compute instance-groups managed list-instances "instance-group-name" --region "us-central1" --format="value(NAME,ZONE,CREATION_TIMESTAMP)" --sort-by='~CREATION_TIMESTAMP'

But it seems --sort-by is not working or I am using it a bit wrong.

Could you please suggest the right way.

Solution

  • It's probably creationTimestamp not CREATION_TIMESTAMP.

    See: instances.list and the response body for the underlying field names.

    It's slightly confusing but gcloud requires you to use the (field|property) names of the underlying request|response types not the output names.

    Another way to more readily determine this is to add --format=yaml or --format=json to gcloud compute instances list (or any gcloud command) to get an idea of what's being returned so that you can begin filtering and formatting it.