Cloud Construct

The Azure command-line interface (Azure CLI) is a set of commands used to create and manage Azure resources. Inevitably I end up querying my Azure resources via the CLI more often then I do anything else. At Cloud Construct, we manage between 25-50 subscriptions. As you can imagine trying to remember the names of every specific resource is a non-starter so navigating the CLI to view specific resources can be difficult at times. Even just setting the current account context can be a pain unless you remember exactly what the name of the Subscription.

This is where the --query parameter can come in handy. Let's take a look at how we can simplify the CLI experience using --query starting with setting the current account context.

Before you can set the account context, you must discover the name of the Subscription in your account. We do this by running 

az account list

Running this command returns something like this:

[
  {
    "cloudName": "AzureCloud",
    "homeTenantId": "some-guid",
    "id": "some-guid",
    "isDefault": false,
    "managedByTenants": [],
    "name": "Subscription Name 1",
    "state": "Enabled",
    "tenantId": "some-guid",
    "user": {
      "name": "michael.paterson@cloudconstruct.com",
      "type": "user"
    }
  },
  {
    "cloudName": "AzureCloud",
    "homeTenantId": "some-guid",
    "id": "some-guid",
    "isDefault": false,
    "managedByTenants": [],
    "name": "Subscription Name 2",
    "state": "Enabled",
    "tenantId": "some-guid",
    "user": {
      "name": "michael.paterson@cloudconstruct.com",
      "type": "user"
    }
  }

Now if you have 50 results that is a lot of scrolling to find the one you are looking for. Instead, let's just bring back the list of subscription names via the name property in the json. Note that because the list command returns an array, we must use [] to select properties in that array like this:

az account list --query [].name

That returns a result similar to this:

[
   "Subscription Name 1",
   "Subscription Name 2",
   "Subscription Name 3",
   "Subscription Name 4"
]

That's much easier to read. Now what if we wanted to pull back multipe fields, say id, name, and state? The syntax would look like this:

az account list --query '[].[id, name, state]'

Note that the query is now in single quotes and surrounded with brackets and returns something like the following:

[
   [ "1", "Subscription Name 1", "Enabled" ],
   [ "2", "Subscription Name 2", "Enabled" ],
   [ "3", "Subscription Name 3", "Enabled" ],
   [ "4", "Subscription Name 4", "Enabled" ]
]

What if want to give names to these properties? 

az account list --query '[].{SubscriptionId:id, SubscriptionName:name, SubscriptionState:state}'

The results now look like this:

[
   {
       "SubscriptionId": "1",
       "SubscriptionName": "Subscription Name 1",
       "SubscriptionStatus": "Enabled"
   },
   {
       "SubscriptionId": "2",
       "SubscriptionName": "Subscription Name 2",
       "SubscriptionStatus": "Enabled"
   },
   {
       "SubscriptionId": "3",
       "SubscriptionName": "Subscription Name 3",
       "SubscriptionStatus": "Enabled"
   },
   {
       "SubscriptionId": "4",
       "SubscriptionName": "Subscription Name 4",
       "SubscriptionStatus": "Enabled"
   }
]

Note that we are now dealing with JSON objects instead of string arrays which is great if we are writing code for automation purposes but isn't quite as readable. To make something easier to read let's output the data to a table:

az account list --query '[].{SubscriptionId:id, SubscriptionName:name, SubscriptionState:state}' -o table

SubscriptionId   SubscriptionName      SubscriptionState
--------------   --------------------  -----------------
1                Subscription Name 1   Enabled
2                Subscription Name 2   Enabled
3                Subscription Name 3   Enabled
4                Subscription Name 4   Enabled

You can find more information on the CLI command output on docs.microsoft.com.