Work with the Azure CLI
The Azure CLI lets you type commands and execute them immediately from the command line. Recall that the overall goal in the software-development example is to deploy new builds of a web app for testing. Let's talk about the sorts of tasks you can do with the Azure CLI.
What Azure resources can be managed using the Azure CLI?
The Azure CLI lets you control nearly every aspect of every Azure resource. You can work with resource groups, storage, virtual machines, Microsoft Entra ID, containers, machine learning, and so on.
Commands in the CLI are structured in groups and subgroups. Each group represents a service provided by Azure, and the subgroups divide commands for these services into logical groupings. For example, the storage group contains subgroups including account, blob, and queue.
So, how do you find the particular commands you need? One way is to use az find, the AI robot that uses the Azure documentation to tell you more about commands, the CLI, and more.
Example: find the most popular commands related to the word blob:
az find blob
Example: Show me the most popular commands for an Azure CLI command group, such as az vm:
az find "az vm"
Example: Show me the most popular parameters and subcommands for an Azure CLI command:
az find "az vm create"
If you already know the name of the command you want, the --help argument for that command will get you more detailed information on the command and a list of the available subcommands for a command group. So, with our storage example, here's how you can get a list of the subgroups and commands for managing blob storage:
az storage blob --help
How to create an Azure resource
When you're creating a new Azure resource, there are typically three steps: connect to your Azure subscription, create the resource, and verify that creation was successful. The following illustration shows a high-level overview of the process.
Each step corresponds to a different Azure CLI command.
Connect
Because you're working with a local install of the Azure CLI, you'll need to authenticate before you can execute Azure commands by using the Azure CLI login command.
az login
The Azure CLI will typically launch your default browser to open the Azure sign-in page. If this doesn't work, follow the command-line instructions and enter an authorization code at https://aka.ms/devicelogin.
After successfully signing in, you'll be connected to your Azure subscription.
Create
You'll often need to create a new resource group before you create a new Azure service, so we'll use resource groups as an example to show how to create Azure resources from the CLI.
The Azure CLI group create command creates a resource group. You must specify a name and location. The name must be unique within your subscription. The location determines where the metadata for your resource group will be stored. You can use strings like "West US," "North Europe," or "West India" to specify the location; alternatively, you can use single-word equivalents, such as westus, northeurope, or westindia. The core syntax is:
az group create --name <name> --location <location>
Important
You don't need to create a resource group when using the free Azure sandbox. Instead, you'll use a pre-created resource group.
Verify
For many Azure resources, the Azure CLI provides a list subcommand to view resource details. For example, the Azure CLI group list command lists your Azure resource groups. This is useful to verify whether the resource group was successfully created:
az group list
To get a more concise view, you can format the output as a simple table:
az group list --output table