Get started

Logging into Azure

Log into Azure using az login. (Note that this is not necessary in Cloud Shell.)

You will be prompted to enter a code into https://aka.ms/devicelogin and then authenticate the session.

In the Windows Terminal you can double click the code to highlight. When text is highlighted then CTRL+C will copy to the clipboard. Use CTRL + Click on the URL to open and then CTRL+V to paste.

The session tokens survive for a number of days so if you are using a shared machine then always issue az logout at the end of your session.

See below if you have multiple Azure IDs and/or subscriptions.

Help

• az shows the main help and list of the commands
• az <command> --help shows help for that command
  • if there are subcommands then you can use the --help or -h at any level
• az find -q <str> will search the index for commands containing <str>
  • e.g. az find -q image
• the Azure CLI reference has a description of the available commands and parameters
• most of the Azure documentation sections have examples and tutorials for CLI 2.0 alongside the Portal and PowerShell

The CLI includes tab auto-complete for both switches and values, which is very useful for auto-completing resource groups, resource names and long subscription descriptions.

Configure

az configure

Run az configure to initiate an interactive session to configure defaults for your output format, logging of sessions, data collection.

The --resource-group and --location switches are common to many commands. If you want to set default values then use az configure --defaults group=myRG location=westeurope.

The argument must be a space delimited list of key=value pairs, and defaults may be unset by a blank string, e.g. group=''.

az config

There is a new az config group which is automatically converting between the ~/.azure/config file’s ini format to JSON. It is useful as it works with cascading files, so you can have standard defaults in your home directory, and then configure a set of overrides in your local directory.

1. See the defaults

   az config get defaults
   

   Example output:

   [
     {
       "name": "location",
       "source": "/home/richeney/.azure/config",
       "value": "uksouth"
     }
   ]
   

2. Create local defaults

mkdir ~/localdir && cd ~/localdir
az config set defaults.group=myResourceGroup defaults.location=westeurope --local

Running az commands in the localdir will use the defaults in the cat ~/localdir/.azure/config file to override those in the home directory.

Note that az confiug is experimental and may change or be removed.

Session defaults

The other way to default those switches is to export the AZURE_DEFAULTS_GROUP and AZURE_DEFAULTS_LOCATION environment variables within the current shell.

These will supersede anything set using az configure or az config. You can see what is in effect by using az configure --list-defaults or az config get defaults.

Output formats

At this point I will assume that you have some resource groups, and that some of those contain virtual machines.

The following command lists out your resource groups, each demonstrating the output formats available

You can also use “none” if you just need the return code and want to suppress output.

Any scripting should always specify the output format as CLI users can use the az configure command to set their preferred default output format.

A couple of points of note

• The JSON and YAML output formats contains the most information about the resources
• The JSON output is great when combined with jq
• The jsonc and yaml outputs are more human readable
• The table output shows a header. The columns (and the header name) can be customised using JMESPATH queries. More on those later.
• The tsv output has more information than the table, but no headers. As it does not include quotes around the values, it makes it a good way of reading values into Bash variables, working well with the cut command in a pipeline. Again, for scripting I would highly recommend using the --query to specify the columns.

Multiple subscriptions

If you have multiple subscriptions then the CLI will work in the context of the active subscription.

If you are constantly switcing between subscriptions then consider adding aliases to the bottom of your ~/.bashrc file, e.g.:

alias vs='az account set --subscription <subscriptionId>; az account show'

You can also specify --subscription on individual CLI commands.