CLI 2.0 First Steps

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.

Note: Most terminals support copy and paste with either the right mouse button, or CTRL-INS / SHIFT-INS. For instance, in the Windows Bash shell you can double click the code to select it then right click to copy.

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 CLI 2.0 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

Configure

• az configure initiates an interactive session to configure defaults for your output format, logging of sessions, data collection.
• az configure --default group=myRG location=westeurope
  • enables the setting of default values for common command switches such as the Resource Group or Azure Region
  • uses space delimited key=value pairs
  • defaults may be unset by a blank string, e.g. group=''

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

Command	Output
az group list --output json	JSON output (default)
az group list --output table	Human readable table
az group list --output jsonc	Coloured JSON output (includes control characters)
az group list --output tsv	Tab seperated values
az group list --output yaml	YAML format output

Any scripting should always specify the output format as CLI 2.0 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 2.0 will work in the context of the active subscription.

Command	Output
az account list	LIst the available subscriptions
az account show	Show the active subscription
az account set --subscription <subscriptionName>	Switch to the named subscription

CLI 2.0 includes tab auto-complete for both switches and values, which is very useful for auto-completing resource groups, resource names and long subscription descriptions.

If you have multiple subscriptions linked to different IDs then browser cache and cookies can cause issues. If that occurs then start an InPrivate or Incognito window and authenticate within that.