VM Management¶

Commands for managing your Cloud Agent VMs.

List VMs¶

Show all Cloud Agent VMs in your GCP project:

ca list

Output:

NAME                    STATUS    ZONE            MACHINE TYPE    EXTERNAL IP
cloud-agent-jsmith      RUNNING   us-central1-a   e2-standard-4   35.192.0.42
cloud-agent-jsmith-2    STOPPED   us-central1-a   e2-standard-4   -

Start VM¶

Start a stopped VM:

ca start

Cost Savings

Stop your VM when not in use to save on GCP costs. Your work is preserved on disk.

Stop VM¶

Stop a running VM (preserves disk):

ca stop

The VM disk is preserved, so you can resume later with ca start.

Terminate VM¶

Permanently delete the VM and all associated resources:

ca terminate

Destructive

This permanently deletes the VM and its disk. Make sure to commit and push any changes first.

Terraform Commands¶

Re-apply Terraform configuration (useful for updating firewall rules):

ca tf

This is useful when:

Your IP address changed
You want to update firewall rules
You modified terraform.tfvars

Multiple VMs¶

Cloud Agent supports one VM per user by default. The VM name is derived from your username/email.

To manage a specific VM:

# List all VMs
ca list

# Operations use the default VM name
ca start
ca stop
ca terminate

GCP Console¶

You can also manage VMs directly in the GCP Console:

Go to Compute Engine → VM instances
Find VMs starting with cloud-agent-
Use the console actions (Start, Stop, Delete)

Resource Cleanup¶

To clean up all Cloud Agent resources:

# Delete the VM
ca terminate

# Remove local Terraform state (optional)
rm -rf .terraform terraform.tfstate*