Azure CLI

Azure CLI is Microsoft's command-line client for Azure. Commands follow the pattern az [group] [subgroup] [command] {parameters}, for example az vm create or az storage. Built-in help is available by passing -h to any group or command. It is a multi-platform tool and is also available in Azure Cloud Shell.

For output and scripting, it supports JSON, table, and tsv output formats, with a default you can change via az configure. The --query parameter takes JMESPath expressions to filter and reshape results, such as az vm list --query "[?provisioningState=='Succeeded'].{ name: name, os: storageProfile.osDisk.osType }". It defines exit codes for scripts: 0 for success, 1 for generic errors, 2 for parser errors, and 3 for a missing ARM resource on show commands. Other documented features include tab completion for groups, commands, and some parameters (including resource group and VM names), generic resource commands via az resource, a raw REST call command via az rest, generic update arguments, async operation handling, and proxy support.

It also integrates with Visual Studio Code through the Azure CLI Tools extension, which provides IntelliSense, snippets, hover documentation, and run-in-terminal for .azcli files. Besides the standard installers, it ships as a Docker image (mcr.microsoft.com/azure-cli) and as edge builds from the dev branch (MSI, Homebrew formula, deb, rpm, and pip). Telemetry is on by default and can be disabled with az config set core.collect_telemetry=no. The typical users are developers, DevOps engineers, and administrators who provision and manage Azure resources interactively or in scripts.

Installation

# via Docker
docker run -u $(id -u):$(id -g) -v ${HOME}:/home/az -e HOME=/home/az --rm -it mcr.microsoft.com/azure-cli:<version>

# via pip (edge build)
pip3 install --pre azure-cli --extra-index-url https://azurecliprod.blob.core.windows.net/edge --upgrade-strategy=eager