I recently ran into a strange issue where I was struggling to get the GCloud SDK to work properly on Mac 14.2.1.

I used brew to install the package brew install google-cloud-sdk and added it to my zshrc file.

After I logged in with gcloud auth login I wanted to copy some files out of a GCP bucket to my local machine with the storage cp command:

gcloud storage cp gs://bucketname/filename .

The command looked fine and detected the right number of files to copy before crashing out with this rather odd looking error message:

gcloud crashed (AttributeError): 'Lock' object has no attribute 'is_fork_ctx'

a quick search surfaced this ticket in google's issue tracker showing exactly the same problem. It turns out that gcloud is a Python package and it doesn't play nicely with the version of Python that this version of MacOS has installed.

My workaround was to use Anaconda (which I have installed anyway as a data science bod) to create a new Python environment at a version that gcloud likes. Then to install gcloud from conda:

conda create -n cloudtest python=3.10
conda activate cloudtest
conda install google-cloud-sdk

Once I had this set up I found that the command suddenly burst into life.

A Simpler Alternative?

If you don't want to use Anaconda, Google's installer offers to install a compatible version of Python for you. In fact, using brew made life harder for me - I could have just followed the Google experience.