Option to suppress auth warning when using install_components without authentication

[mohammadshamma]

TL;DR

When using setup-gcloud solely to install components (e.g., cloud-firestore-emulator for testing), the action emits a warning:

The gcloud CLI is not authenticated (or it is not installed). Authenticate by adding the "google-github-actions/auth" step prior this one.

This warning is misleading for users who intentionally don't need authentication — they only need gcloud to install a component. There should be a way to suppress it.

Use Case

We use setup-gcloud in CI to install the Firestore emulator for integration tests:

- name: Set up Google Cloud SDK
  uses: google-github-actions/setup-gcloud@v2
  with:
    install_components: 'cloud-firestore-emulator'

- name: Run tests
  run: pytest

The emulator runs locally and requires no GCP credentials. Authentication is irrelevant to this use case, but the warning appears on every workflow run, creating noise in CI logs.

Proposal

Add an optional input (e.g., skip_auth_check: true) to suppress the authentication warning when users knowingly don't need authentication.

Alternatively, the action could skip the auth check automatically when only install_components is specified and no other gcloud-dependent inputs (like project_id) are provided.

Related

• Spurious warning auth is unavailabe, but gcloud works #670 — similar request, but for a different use case (self-hosted runners with ADC). The maintainer's response was that warnings can be ignored, but for component-only installations the warning is particularly misleading since auth is genuinely unnecessary.