Azure CLI

The Azure CLI is a command-line program to connect to Azure and execute administrative commands on Azure resources. It runs on Linux, macOS, and Windows and allows administrators and developers to execute their commands through a terminal or command-line prompt

Example command that restarts a virtual machine:

az vm restart -g MyResourceGroup -n MyVm

Can be used in two different ways:

• installed locally
• used from a browser through the Azure Cloud Shell

Example of installing it for Mac:

brew update && brew install azure-cli

To sign in we type:

az login

typing the above will take you to a browser where you are asked to login. Once that is done you are good to go.

Commands

Commands in the CLI are organized as commands _of _groups

Next up let's see what commands we have at our disposal:

• az group, for resource groups
• az vm , for virtual machines
• az storage account, for storage accounts
• az keyvault, for managing keyvault
• az webapp, for managing webapps
• az sql server, for managing sql server databases
• az cosmosdb, for managing cosmosdb

Searching for commands names containing the word secret, type the following:

az find -q secret

Interactive mode

The CLI offers an interactive mode that automatically displays help information and makes it easier to select subcommands.

To use type:

az interactive

Creating a storage account

Every storage account must belong to an Azure resource group. A resource group is a logical container for grouping your Azure services. When you create a storage account, you have the option to either create a new resource group, or use an existing resource group.

Let's first look at how to create a resource group:

az group create \
    --name resourceForStorageAccount \
    --location westeurope

The results of running it should look something like this: provisioningState should say Succeeded

Next up let's create the actual storage account:

az storage account create \
    --name storageaccount666 \
    --resource-group resourceForStorageAccount \
    --location westeurope \
    --sku Standard_LRS \
    --kind StorageV2

Storage account names needs to be lowercase Also this one will answer with a long JSON response. Ensure the provisioningState says Succeeded

Let's have a look at our resource group in our Azure portal We can click Resource groups in the menu to the left and on the top middle we can search for our resource group resourceForStorageAccount. Doing so leads to a search list and as you can see from the image above we are looking at the detail page for the resource group. One thing that is listed is all the things associated with it. For now that's only our storage account storageaccount666. So now we clearly see the azure cli is working well.

Now that we are done we can either choose to let everything remain as it is or we can clean up our used resource. If we opt for the latter we should type the following:

az group delete --name resourceForStorageAccount

Tutorials

Azure CLI Tutorial