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Deploy cloudflared in GCP

The purpose of this guide is to walk through some best practices for accessing private resources on Google Cloud Platform (GCP) by deploying Cloudflare’s lightweight connector, cloudflared.

Prerequisites

Create your environment

To start, you will need to navigate to the Google Cloud Console and create a project. This project will contain all of your future Google Cloud resources, including the VM instances you will create in this process.

  1. From the Cloud Console, navigate to Compute Engine.

  2. Under Compute Engine, select VM Instances.

  3. In the main window, select Create Instance.

  4. Name your VM Instance. In this example, we will name it GCP-01.

  5. Configure your VM Instance. The following settings are recommended to get started:

    • Machine Family: General Purpose
    • Series: E2
    • Machine Type: e2-micro
    • Boot Disk: Debian GNU/Linux 10
    • Firewall: Allow HTTP/HTTPS traffic (if necessary)
    • Networking, Disks, Security, Management, Sole-Tenancy: Management

  6. Add a startup script for testing access. Here is an example:

    #!/bin/bash
apt update
apt -y install apache2
cat <<EOF > /var/www/html/index.html
<html><body><h1>Hello Cloudflare!</h1>
<p>This page was created from a startup script for a Cloudflare demo.</p>
</body></html>
EOF

  7. Spin up your VM Instance by clicking Create.

Deploying cloudflared

Now that you have your Virtual Machine up and running in GCP, you can login into your VM instance by selecting SSH in the Connect column of our VM Instance table.

  1. Run sudo su to gain full admin rights to the Virtual Machine.

  2. Run apt install wget to install any relevant dependencies for our fresh Virtual Machine.

  3. Next, install cloudflared on your Virtual Machine. In this example, we are running a Debian-based VM Instance, so you will first download the debian build of cloudflared.

    wget <https://github.com/cloudflare/cloudflared/releases/latest/download/cloudflared-linux-amd64>
mv ./cloudflared-linux-amd64 /usr/local/bin/cloudflared
chmod a+x /usr/local/bin/cloudflared

  4. Run the following command to ensure you have the most updated cloudflared version. The command should auto-run after pasting.

    cloudflared update

  5. Run the following command to authenticate cloudflared with your Cloudflare account. The command will launch a browser window where you will be prompted to log in with your Cloudflare account and pick any zone you have added to Cloudflare.

    $ cloudflared tunnel login

  6. Create a tunnel.

    $ cloudflared tunnel create GCP-01`

  7. Route your tunnel. In this example, we will expose the smallest range available. We can add more IP routes later if necessary.

    cloudflared tunnel route ip add 10.128.0.4/32 GCP-01

Complete tunnel configuration

  1. Make a directory for your configuration file.

    mkdir /etc/cloudflared

    cd /etc/cloudflared

  2. Build a configuration file. Before moving forward and entering vim, copy your Tunnel ID and credentials path to a notepad.

    vim config.yml

  3. Type i to begin editing the file and copy-paste the following settings in it.

    tunnel: <Tunnel ID/name>
credentials-file: /root/.cloudflared/<Tunnel ID>.json
protocol: quic
warp-routing:
   enabled: true
logfile: /var/log/cloudflared.log
#cloudflared to the origin debug
loglevel: debug
#cloudflared to cloudflare debug
transport-loglevel: info

  4. Press space and then type :x to save and exit.

  5. Run cloudflared as a service.

cloudflared service install

systemctl start cloudflared

systemctl status cloudflared

Next, visit the Zero Trust dashboard and ensure your new tunnel shows as active. Optionally, begin creating Zero Trust policies to secure your private resources.