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page_title: Authorizing Packer Builds in Azure
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# Authorizing Packer Builds in Azure

In order to build VMs in Azure packer needs 6 configuration options to be specified:

- `tenant_id` - UUID identifying your Azure account (where you login)
- `subscription_id` - UUID identifying your Azure subscription (where billing is handled)
- `client_id` - UUID identifying the Active Directory service principal that will run your packer builds
- `client_secret` - service principal secret / password
- `resource_group_name` - name of the resource group where your VHD(s) will be stored
- `storage_account` - name of the storage account where your VHD(s) will be stored

-> Behind the scenes packer uses the OAuth protocol to authenticate against Azure Active Directory and authorize requests to the Azure Service Management API. These topics are unncessarily complicated so we will try to ignore them for the rest of this document.<br /><br />You do not need to understand how OAuth works in order to use Packer with Azure, though the Active Directory terms "service principal" and "role" will be useful for understanding Azure's access policies.

In order to get all of the items above, you will need a username and password for your Azure account.

## Install the Azure CLI

To get the credentials above, we will need to install the Azure CLI. Please refer to Microsoft's official [intallation guide](https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/articles/xplat-cli-install/).

-> The guides below also use a tool called [`jq`](https://stedolan.github.io/jq/) to simplify the output from the Azure CLI, though this is optional. If you use homebrew you can simply `brew install node jq`.

If you already have node.js installed you can use `npm` to install `azure-cli`:

    npm install -g azure-cli --no-progress

## Guided Setup

The packer project includes a [setup script](https://github.com/mitchellh/packer/blob/master/contrib/azure-setup.sh) that can help you setup your account. It uses an interactive bash script to log you into Azure, name your resources, and export your packer configuration.

## Manual Setup

If you want more control or the script does not work for you, you can also use the manual instructions below to setup your Azure account. You will need to manually keep track of the various account identifiers, resource names, and your service principal password.

### Identify Your Tenant and Subscription IDs

Login using the Azure CLI

    azure config mode arm
    azure login -u USERNAME

Get your account information

    azure account list --json | jq .[].name
    azure account set ACCOUNTNAME
    azure account show --json | jq ".[] | .tenantId, .id"

-> Throughout this document when you see a command pipe to `jq` you may instead omit `--json` and everything after it, but the output will be more verbose. For example you can simply run `azure account list` instead._

This will print out two lines that look like this:

    "4f562e88-8caf-421a-b4da-e3f6786c52ec"
    "b68319b-2180-4c3e-ac1f-d44f5af2c6907"

The first one is your `tenant_id`. The second is your `subscription_id`. Note these for later.

### Create a Resource Group

A [resource group](https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/articles/resource-group-overview/#resource-groups) is used to organize related resources. Resource groups and storage accounts are tied to a location. To see available locations, run:

    azure location list
    ...
    azure group create -n GROUPNAME -l LOCATION

Your storage account (below) will need to use the same `GROUPNAME` and `LOCATION`.

### Create a Storage Account

We will need to create a storage account where your packer artifacts will be stored. We will create a `LRS` storage account which is the least expensive price/GB at the time of writing.

    azure storage account create -g GROUPNAME \
        -l LOCATION --type LRS STORAGENAME

-> `LRS` is meant as a literal "LRS" and not as a variable.

Make sure that `GROUPNAME` and `LOCATION` are the same as above.

### Create an Application

An application represents a way to authorize access to the Azure API. Note that you will need to specify a URL for your application (this is intended to be used for OAuth callbacks) but these do not actually need to be valid URLs.

    azure ad app create -n APPNAME -i APPURL --home-page APPURL -p PASSWORD

Password is your `client_secret` and can be anything you like. I recommend using `openssl rand -base64 24`.

### Create a Service Principal

You cannot directly grant permissions to an application. Instead, you create a service principal associated with the application and assign permissions to the service principal.

First, get the `APPID` for the application we just created.

    azure ad app list --json | \ 
        jq '.[] | select(.displayName | contains("APPNAME")) | .appId'
    azure ad sp create --applicationId APPID

### Grant Permissions to Your Application

Finally, we will associate the proper permissions with our application's service principal. We're going to assign the `Owner` role to our packer application and change the scope to manage our whole subscription. This allows Packer to create temporary resource groups for each build.

    azure role assignment create --spn APPURL -o "Owner" \
        -c /subscriptions/SUBSCRIPTIONID

There are a lot of pre-defined roles and you can define your own with more granular permissions, though this is out of scope. You can see a list of pre-configured roles via:

    azure role list --json | \
        jq ".[] | {name:.Name, description:.Description}"

### Configuring Packer

Now (finally) everything has been setup in Azure. Let's get our configuration keys together:

Get `tenant_id` and `subscription_id`:

    azure account show --json | jq ".[] | .tenantId, .id"

Get `client_id`

    azure ad app list --json | \
        jq '.[] | select(.displayName | contains("APPNAME")) | .appId'

Get `client_secret`

This cannot be retrieved. If you forgot this, you will have to delete and re-create your service principal and the associated permissions.

Get `resource_group_name`

    azure group list

Get `storage_account`

    azure storage account list