Create an Azure Resource interactively with Azure CLI

5 minutes

In interactive mode, Azure CLI allows you to enter and run commands immediately.

In the Customer Relationship Management (CRM) example, the goal is to create three test environments, each containing virtual machines (VMs). Use resource groups to ensure the VMs are organized into separate environments:

Unit testing
Integration testing
Acceptance testing

Since you only need to create the resource groups once, using Azure CLI interactively for this task is a reasonable choice.

Example: How to create a resource group with Azure CLI

Let's perform a common task: creating a resource group. Resource groups help you manage related resources collectively, and creating a new resource group is often one of the first tasks you perform when starting a new Azure solution.

Here are the three steps you need to follow:

Connect to Azure using az login.
Work with Azure subscriptions using az account.
Work with resource groups using az group.

Connect to Azure

When using a local installation of Azure CLI, you must authenticate before executing any Azure CLI commands. The az login command prompts you for your Azure credentials and then connects to your Azure subscription.

To connect interactively, you don't need to specify parameters:

az login

This command opens a prompt for your Azure credentials and establishes a connection to your Azure subscription.

Here are some handy tips when authenticating to Azure with Azure CLI:

If running the Azure CLI in Azure Cloud Shell ...
- You're authenticated automatically.
- You might need to change your default subscription.
When running the Azure CLI through a local installation ...
- You're prompted for your Azure credentials.
- There's a subscription selector at time of login.

Work with subscriptions

If you're new to Azure, you only have a single subscription. However, if you've been using Azure for a while, you might have multiple subscriptions. Azure CLI allows you to configure which subscription your commands are executed against.

You can only be active in one subscription at a time. Use the az account show reference command to determine which subscription is currently active. If it's not the correct one, you can switch subscriptions using the az account set reference command.

Get a list of all your subscriptions returning the results in a table:
```
az account list --output table
```
Get just the current active subscription:
```
az account show
```

Change your active subscription:

az account set --subscription "00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000000"

Work with resource groups

When creating resources in Azure, you place them into a resource group for management purposes.

To create a resource group, use the az group create reference command. You must specify a name and a location, and the name must be unique within your subscription. The location determines where the metadata for your resource group is stored, which can be important for compliance reasons. Use the az account list-locations command to determine available locations.

Note

If you're working in an Azure sandbox, it creates the resource group for you. If you prefer to work in your own subscription, use the following commands.

The syntax for creating a resource group is:

az group create --name MyResourceGroup --location eastus

To retrieve a list of all resource groups in the active subscription, use the az group list command.

az group list

For a more concise view, you can return the list in a table:

az group list --output table

When you're developing and testing an Azure CLI script, it's best to create a resource group that contains a random ID in the name. Adding a random ID to your resource group name allows you to retest your code without having to wait for a prior resource group of the same name to be removed from Azure.

#!/bin/bash
let "randomIdentifier=$RANDOM*$RANDOM"
location="eastus"
resourceGroup="msdocs-rg-$randomIdentifier"
az group create --name $resourceGroup --location $location --output json

Example: Create an Azure Virtual Machine

Creating virtual machines (VMs) is a common task you can perform with Azure CLI.

The az vm create command is used to create a VM. This command has several parameters to handle the extensive configuration settings for a VM. Most parameters have reasonable default values, so you typically need to specify only five key items:

resource-group: The resource group where the new VM is placed.
name: The name of the VM in Azure.
location: The geographic region where the VM is provisioned.
image: The operating system image to use for the VM, typically a Linux distribution, or Windows Server.
admin-username: Administrator username for the VM. You're prompted to enter a password at the command line.

Bash
PowerShell

Here's a Bash script example:

#!/bin/bash

# Create variables
rgName="myResourceGroupName"
vmName="myVMname"
vmImage="Win2022AzureEditionCore"
vmAdminUserName="myAzureUserName"

# Create the VM
az vm create \
    --resource-group $rgName \
    --name $vmName \
    --image $vmImage \
    --public-ip-sku Standard \
    --admin-username $vmAdminUserName

Here's the equivalent example to create a VM in a PowerShell environment:

# Create variables
$rgName = "myResourceGroupName"
$vmName = "myVMname"
$vmImage = "Win2022AzureEditionCore"
$vmAdminUserName = "myAzureUserName"

# Create the VM
az vm create `
    --resource-group $rgName `
    --name $vmName `
    --image $vmImage `
    --public-ip-sku Standard `
    --admin-username $vmAdminUserName

Example: Get information for a VM

You can list the VMs in your subscription using the az vm list command. This command also supports retrieving a specific VM by specifying the --name parameter.

Here's how to store the ID of a VM in a variable:

#!/bin/bash
rgName="myResourceGroupName"
vmID=$(az vm list --resource-group $rgName \
    --query "[?name=='myVMname'].id" --output tsv)
echo $vmID

Using the az vm update command, change the size of your VM:

#!/bin/bash
rgName="myResourceGroupName"
vmName="msdocs-vm-01"
newVMsize="Standard_DS3_v2"

# Get the VM ID
vmID=$(az vm list --resource-group $rgName \
    --query "[?name=='$vmName'].id" --output tsv)

# Update the VM size
az vm update --ids $vmID --size $newVMsize

# Show the new properties of the VM
az vm show --resource-group $rgName --name $vmName

This exercise demonstrated a typical pattern for an interactive Azure CLI session. You first used a standard command to create a new resource group. You then used a set of commands to deploy a resource (in this example, a VM) into this resource group. You could easily combine this set of commands into a shell script and execute it every time you need to create the same resource.