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What is the Azure Developer CLI?

Building and deploying cloud applications can be complex and time-consuming. Developers often face challenges such as setting up cloud infrastructure, configuring deployment pipelines, and ensuring best practices for security and scalability. Managing these tasks typically requires deep knowledge of Azure services, infrastructure as code, and DevOps processes, which can slow down development and increase the risk of errors.

The Azure Developer CLI (azd) is an open-source tool that accelerates provisioning and deploying app resources on Azure. azd provides best practice, developer-friendly commands that map to key stages in your development workflow, whether you're working in the terminal, an integrated development environment (IDE), or through CI/CD (continuous integration/continuous deployment) pipelines.

azd uses extensible blueprint templates that include everything you need to get an application up and running on Azure. These templates include:

  • Reusable infrastructure as code assets to provision cloud resources services using Bicep or Terraform.
  • Proof-of-concept or starter app code that can be customized or replaced with your own app code.
  • Configuration files to handle deploying your app to the provisioned resources.
  • Optionally, pipeline workflow files for GitHub Actions or Azure Pipelines to enable CI/CD integrations.

You can also create your own template or find one to customize and expand on from the Awesome AZD gallery.

A sample azd workflow

The following steps demonstrate the basics of a common azd workflow. Visit the installation and quickstart pages for more details on installing and getting started with azd.

You can install azd on common platforms using a single command:

winget install microsoft.azd

After you install azd, provision and deploy app resources to Azure in only a few steps:

  1. Select an Azure Developer CLI template such as the hello-azd demo template that contains the app resources you want to provision and deploy.

  2. Run the azd init command to initialize the template:

    azd init -t hello-azd

  3. Run the azd up command to package, provision and deploy the app resources:

    azd up

  4. Iterate on the application code and deploy changes as needed by running azd deploy.

  5. Update Azure resources by modifying the template's Infrastructure as Code (IaC) and then running azd provision.

    Note

    Alternatively, you can also run azd up whenever you make a changes to your app code or infrastructure files, which handles both provisioning and deploying app resources. Visit the [reference page] for a complete list of azd commands.

Introductory video

Check out the following video for a demonstration of working with azd. More azd video content is available on the Microsoft Developer YouTube channel.

Next steps