First, install gcloud-node with npm and require it into your project:

$ npm install --save gcloud
var gcloud = require('gcloud');

If you are running your app on Google Compute Engine, you won't need to worry about supplying connection configuration options to gcloud-node— we figure that out for you.

However, if you're running your app elsewhere, you will need to provide project details to authenticate API requests.

// Compute Engine var gcloud = require('gcloud'); // Elsewhere var gcloud = require('gcloud')({ projectId: 'project-id', keyFilename: '/path/to/keyfile.json' });

The full set of options which can be passed to gcloud-node and sub-modules are outlined here.