Azure Identity Plugin for Visual Studio Code Authentication

Article
04/04/2023

This package provides a plugin to the Azure Identity library for JavaScript (@azure/identity) that enables authentication through the "Azure Account" extension for Visual Studio Code. This plugin provides the dependencies of the VisualStudioCodeCredential in @azure/identity and enables it for use on its own or as part of DefaultAzureCredential.

Source code | Samples

Getting started

import { useIdentityPlugin } from "@azure/identity";
import { vsCodePlugin } from "@azure/identity-vscode";

useIdentityPlugin(vsCodePlugin);

Prerequisites

An Azure subscription.
Install Visual Studio Code and the "Azure Account" extension

Install the package

This package is designed to be used with Azure Identity for JavaScript. Install both @azure/identity and this package using npm:

$ npm install --save @azure/identity
$ npm install --save-dev @azure/identity-vscode

Supported Environments

Azure Identity plugins for JavaScript support stable (even numbered) versions of Node.js starting from v12. While the plugins may run in other Node versions, no support is guaranteed. @azure/identity-vscode does not support browser environments.

Key concepts

If this is your first time using @azure/identity or the Microsoft identity platform (Azure Active Directory), we recommend that you read Using @azure/identity with Microsoft Identity Platform first. This document will give you a deeper understanding of the platform and how to configure your Azure account correctly.

Azure Identity Plugins

As of @azure/identity version 2.0.0, the Identity client library for JavaScript includes a plugin API. This package (@azure/identity-vscode) exports a plugin object that you must pass as an argument to the top-level useIdentityPlugin function from the @azure/identity package. Enable authentication through the "Azure Account" extension for Visual Studio Code as follows:

import { useIdentityPlugin } from "@azure/identity";
import { vsCodePlugin } from "@azure/identity-vscode";

useIdentityPlugin(vsCodePlugin);

After calling useIdentityPlugin, the VisualStudioCodeCredential from the @azure/identity package will be enabled. If this plugin is not used, then VisualStudioCodeCredential will throw a CredentialUnavailableError, and it will not be available as part of DefaultAzureCredential.

Visual Studio Code Authentication

VisualStudioCodeCredential uses the authentication session from the "Azure Account" extension. To use this credential, you must sign in to your Azure account using the extension. To do so, open Visual Studio Code, ensure that the extension is installed, and sign in from Command Palette using the "Azure: Sign In" option to open a browser window and sign in to Azure. Alternatively, you can select "Azure: Sign In with Device Code" to use the device code flow.

After signing in, you may need to select a subscription (for example, if you have multiple Azure subscriptions), and you can change the active subscription by using the menu to select the "Azure: Select Subscriptions" entry.

Examples

Once the plugin is registered, you can use VisualStudioCodeCredential in a similar fashion to the other credential classes in @azure/identity:

import { useIdentityPlugin, VisualStudioCodeCredential } from "@azure/identity";
import { vsCodePlugin } from "@azure/identity-vscode";

useIdentityPlugin(vsCodePlugin);

async function main() {
  const credential = new VisualStudioCodeCredential();

  // The graph.microsoft.com scope is used as an example
  const scope = "https://graph.microsoft.com/.default";

  // Print out part of the access token
  console.log((await credential.getToken(scope)).token.substr(0, 10), "...");
}

main().catch((error) => {
  console.error("An error occurred:", error);
  process.exit(1);
});

You can also use DefaultAzureCredential, which will attempt to authenticate using the "Azure Account" extension for Visual Studio Code if it's available:

import { useIdentityPlugin, DefaultAzureCredential } from "@azure/identity";
import { vsCodePlugin } from "@azure/identity-vscode";

useIdentityPlugin(vsCodePlugin);

async function main() {
  // With the plugin enabled above, `DefaultAzureCredential` will use
  // Visual Studio Code's "Azure Account" extension to authenticate if
  // it is available.
  const credential = new DefaultAzureCredential();

  // This will print a JWT access_token and its expiration timestamp
  // The graph.microsoft.com scope is used as an example
  console.log("Token:", await credential.getToken("https://graph.microsoft.com/.default"));
}

main().catch((error) => {
  console.error("An error occurred:", error);
  process.exit(1);
});

Troubleshooting

Logging

Enabling logging may help uncover useful information about failures. In order to see a log of HTTP requests and responses, set the AZURE_LOG_LEVEL environment variable to info. Alternatively, logging can be enabled at runtime by calling setLogLevel in the @azure/logger:

import { setLogLevel } from "@azure/logger";

setLogLevel("info");

Next steps

Provide Feedback

If you encounter bugs or have suggestions, please open an issue.

Contributing

If you'd like to contribute to this library, please read the contributing guide to learn more about how to build and test the code.

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