Creating and configuring a GCE instance

After creating the start up script, follow these steps:

1. With the start up script ready, we can create an instance using the gcloud command:

$ gcloud compute instances create mysite-instance \
--image-family=debian-8 \
--image-project=debian-cloud \
--machine-type=g1-small \
--scopes userinfo-email,cloud-platform \
--metadata-from-file startup-script=./startup-script.sh \
--zone us-east1-c \
--tags mysite-server 

2. You can check the progress of the instance creation using the following command:

$ gcloud compute instances get-serial-port-output \
mysite-instance --zone us-east1-c

3. Create a firewall rule to allow access to port 3000 to the instance:

$ gcloud compute firewall-rules create default-allow-http-3000 \
--allow tcp:3000 \
--source-ranges 0.0.0.0/0 \
--target-tags mysite-server \
--description "Allow port 3000 access to mysite-server" 

   The following screenshot shows the details of the firewall rule:

4. Get the public IP of the instance from the Google Cloud Console or by using the following command:

$ gcloud compute instances list

5. Navigate to http://<public IP of the instance>:3000 to see the application running.