Overview

A quick aide memoire on getting the Azure CLI set up. I frequently jump between AWS and Azure, and traditional on-prem phsycial and virtual infrastructure. If a few months have elapsed, I might not have the current CLI muscle memory, so this is just a quick reference reminder.

Installation

Unless you need the absolute bleeding-edge support, I’d suggest sticking with your vendor-supplied package for Azure CLI if you’re working from a current distro.

wmcdonald@fedora ~ → cat /etc/fedora-release 
Fedora release 41 (Forty One)
wmcdonald@fedora ~ → az -v
azure-cli                         2.70.0

core                              2.70.0
telemetry                          1.1.0

Dependencies:
msal                            1.31.2b1
azure-mgmt-resource               23.1.1

Python location '/usr/bin/python3.9'
Config directory '/home/wmcdonald/.azure'
Extensions directory '/home/wmcdonald/.azure/cliextensions'

Python (Linux) 3.9.21 (main, Feb 10 2025, 00:00:00) 
[GCC 14.2.1 20250110 (Red Hat 14.2.1-7)]

Legal docs and information: aka.ms/AzureCliLegal


Your CLI is up-to-date.

How-to

  1. Log-in

     wmcdonald@fedora ~ → az login

  2. View all available Azure accounts

     wmcdonald@fedora ~ → az account list

  3. View currently configured account

     wmcdonald@fedora ~ → az account show

  4. Switch to a specific account

     wmcdonald@fedora ~ → az account set -s <azure-account-uuid>

  5. You can now create, list and delete resources using the CLI

     wmcdonald@fedora ~ → az group create --name rg-demo --location ukwest --tags env=prod dept=finance
 {
     "id": "/subscriptions/<subscription-uuid>/resourceGroups/rg-demo",
     "location": "ukwest",
     "managedBy": null,
     "name": "rg-demo",
     "properties": {
         "provisioningState": "Succeeded"
     },
     "tags": {
         "dept": "finance",
         "env": "prod"
     },
     "type": "Microsoft.Resources/resourceGroups"
 }

Summary

That’s it, dead simple. Next we’ll move on to deploying stuff, and you can choose Terraform, or Bicep, see the Further reading section

Further reading