How to Enable and Manage APIs and services in Google Cloud Platform (GCP)

3 min readJan 5, 2021

When you work on Google Cloud Platform (GCP), you may need to enable or manage some APIs and services. For example to be able to use Apache Spark on Google Cloud, you need to enable Compute Engine, Dataproc and BigQuery Storage APIs. In this article you learn how to do it either from terminal (Google Shell ) or from Google Cloud web GUI.

Before starting, you need a Google Account, then go to Google Cloud platform , and login with you account.

You also need to create a project:

Manage Services with terminal command in Google shell

How to open Google Shell ( terminal in Google Cloud)

To be able to write command line codes in GCP terminal, you can open Google shell by clicking on a small icon on Google Cloud Console:

Which Google APIs or services are available for your project

To know the name of services and APIs which are available to your project ( either enabled or disabled ) run this command in terminal ( Google shell):

gcloud services list --available

You should see something similar to this:

Which Google APIs or services are enabled for your project

To know the name of services and APIs which are enabled in your project run this command in terminal ( Google shell):

gcloud services list --enabled

Enable Google APIs from Terminal

Once you get the list of services, you may need to enable one or more of them. To do so, run the following command in Google shell terminal:

gcloud services enable <SERVICE NAME1> <SERVICE NAME2> ...

for example, to enable Compute Engine, Dataproc and BigQuery Storage APIs, you can run this command:

gcloud services enable compute.googleapis.com \
  dataproc.googleapis.com \
  bigquerystorage.googleapis.com

Manage Services using Google Cloud Platform web GUI

If you are not comfortable with typing commands in terminal, you can manage services from GUI by following these steps:

First from GCP web GUI select APIs and Services > Dashboard >

Second, click on the button on top in the dashboard to enable APIs and services:

Third, type name of service that you want to manage or enable and select it from the result:

Thanks for reading this article! Leave a comment below if you have any questions.