Your first request

Create a Compute Engine network record, read it back, then delete it. This works on the Free plan and on Pro. No real network is created, and nothing carries traffic. Each step shows the output to expect. The steps were run against Vera 1.2.2 on 8 November 2026.

Before you start

• A running emulator. Start it as in Get started. No license key is needed.
• gcloud or curl. The gcloud steps were run with gcloud 585.0.0.
• No Google Cloud account. The emulator doesn’t check credentials, and Compute Engine accepts any project ID. This walkthrough uses example-project.

Point your client at the emulator

Run these in a terminal of their own, so this setup doesn’t mix with your real Google Cloud work. They use Google Cloud’s address on your machine, as published in Get started: if you published another host port, use that one.

gcloud

Turn off credentials, pick the project and send Compute Engine requests to the emulator:

export VERA_ENDPOINT="http://localhost:8081"
export CLOUDSDK_AUTH_DISABLE_CREDENTIALS=true
export CLOUDSDK_CORE_PROJECT=example-project
export CLOUDSDK_API_ENDPOINT_OVERRIDES_COMPUTE="$VERA_ENDPOINT/"

REST

Every request goes to the project’s Compute Engine path, with no Authorization header:

export VERA_ENDPOINT="http://localhost:8081"
BASE="$VERA_ENDPOINT/compute/v1/projects/example-project"

Create a network

The network is custom mode, so it creates no subnets of its own. If you run this twice before cleaning up, the second create fails, since the network already exists.

gcloud

gcloud compute networks create vera-docs-network \
  --subnet-mode=custom --quiet

REST

curl --fail --silent --show-error \
  --request POST "$BASE/global/networks" \
  --header 'Content-Type: application/json' \
  --data '{"name":"vera-docs-network","autoCreateSubnetworks":false}'

The response is an operation that’s already DONE, with operationType insert. Its name, IDs and times differ on every run.

Read it back

gcloud

Print the network’s name and whether it creates its own subnets:

gcloud compute networks describe vera-docs-network \
  --format="value(name,autoCreateSubnetworks)"

The two values are separated by a tab. False is the custom mode you asked for.

Output

vera-docs-network  False

REST

curl --fail --silent --show-error \
  "$BASE/global/networks/vera-docs-network"

The response is the network record. These are its main fields:

Response

{
  "kind": "compute#network",
  "name": "vera-docs-network",
  "autoCreateSubnetworks": false
}

Clean up

Delete the network. Both tabs use the same name, so clean up in one before trying the other.

gcloud

gcloud compute networks delete vera-docs-network --quiet

REST

curl --fail --silent --show-error \
  --request DELETE "$BASE/global/networks/vera-docs-network"

The response is an operation that’s already DONE, with operationType delete.

Next steps

• Compute Engine: build a network, a subnet and an instance record, and see where the emulator stops.
• Using the emulator: the setup every Google Cloud service shares, and the limits that apply to all of them.
• Pub/Sub walkthrough: publish a message and pull it back, also on the Free plan.