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Exercise vm via cli

CLI Interface Tutorial / Exercise

for the MSU Cloud Computing Fellowship

This tutorial walks through using the CLI with code you can copy, modify and try. This will run in the Azure portal "cloud shell" if you have set it up to use the CLI interface (not the PowerShell interface)

You can refer to the original tutorial which is perhaps more clear, but doesn't quite fit our situation : Quickstart: Create a Linux virtual machine with the Azure CLI

If you follow this - please don't delete your resource group!

In the code below, lines that start with # are comments only, but the other lines are commands. You can copy/paste one command at at time into the CLI of the cloud shell. Since these are long commands, a long command can be broken up using the line-continuation character which is the back-slash \ so one command are all the lines until the last one that does not end with a back-slash

First, Launch Azure Cloud Shell

The Azure Cloud Shell is a free interactive shell that you can use to run the steps in this article. It has common Azure tools preinstalled and configured to use with your account.

To open the Cloud Shell, just select Try it from the upper right corner of a code block. You can also open Cloud Shell in a separate browser tab by going to https://shell.azure.com/bash. Select Copy to copy the blocks of code, paste it into the Cloud Shell, and select Enter to run it.

Exploratory Commands

The Azure CLI command line always starts with the base command az and is followed by the type of resource you are working with, followed by the subcommand you are running, followed by additional options.

If you are running these on your computer, you will first have to run the command az login You may not have to do this if you are using the Azure portal cloud shell (since you are already logged in)

To see the Azure account you are currently running in, try

az account show

example output (in JSON format): 

{
  "environmentName": "AzureCloud",
  "homeTenantId": "22177130-642f-41d9-9211-74237ad5687d",
  "id": "45155965-8c04-4910-b30d-900000b9c631",
  "isDefault": true,
  "managedByTenants": [],
  "name": "MSU Cloud Computing Fellowship",
  "state": "Enabled",
  "tenantId": "22177130-642f-41d9-9211-74237ad5687d",
  "user": {
    "name": "billspat@msu.edu",
    "type": "user"
  }
}

To see the list of storage accounts you have access to, try the following command.

Before running these command, we've used you really need to edit anything that you see in angle brackets. For example, where you see <mygroupname> put in your actual resource group name.

az storage account list -g <mygroupname>

The documentation for this command and others related to storage accounts is here:
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/cli/azure/storage/account?view=azure-cli-latest#az-storage-account-show

An example command they give looks like this:

az storage account show -g MyResourceGroup -n MyStorageAccount

In their examples, you just have to know that you need to replace your group and storage account names for the parameters.

Try running the following commands

Before running these commands you really need to edit anything that you see in angle brackets. For example, where you see <mygroupname> put in your actual resource group name. 

# create a VM and all of the items needed for it  : OS Disk, network security group, etc.  
# replace the names with your own group and other names.  
# Remember to change the group and VM name

az vm create \
  --resource-group <mygroupname> \
  --name <mytestvm> \
  --image Debian11 \
  --public-ip-sku Standard \
  --admin-username azureuser \
  --tags 'activity=cli_tutorial' \
  --generate-ssh-keys

Here is a real example command for my own resource group: 

az vm create \
 --resource-group ccf23_billspat \
 --name billspat-tutorial-vm \
 --image Debian11 \
 --public-ip-sku Standard
 --admin-username billspat \
 --tags 'activity=cli_tutorial' \
 --generate-ssh-keys

The output will look something like this: 

{
  "fqdns": "",
  "id": "/subscriptions/047e742e-cb26-41e6-a9d6-9d42c67f43e6/resourceGroups/ccf22_billspat/providers/Microsoft.Compute/virtualMachines/billspat-tutorial-vm",
  "location": "northcentralus",
  "macAddress": "00-22-48-8F-48-C2",
  "powerState": "VM running",
  "privateIpAddress": "10.4.0.5",
  "publicIpAddress": "20.236.78.140",
  "resourceGroup": "ccf23_billspat",
  "zones": ""
}
Copy and paste that somewhere for reference last.

Now give that VM a purpose and install a web server. There are many webserver that you can install, but nginx is easy to install and open source. You can do this in two ways

1) use the CLI to run a command on the VM directly 

az vm run-command invoke \
   --resource-group <mygroupname> \
   --name <mytestvm> \
   --command-id RunShellScript \
   --scripts "sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install -y nginx"

2) use SSH to connect to the VM and run it directly. that will be for another tutorial!

The output from the command above will be something like

{
  "value": [
    {
      "code": "ProvisioningState/succeeded",
      "displayStatus": "Provisioning succeeded",
      "level": "Info",
      "message": "Enable succeeded: \n[stdout]\ne libnginx-mod-http-xslt-filter.\r\nPreparing to unpack .../23-libnginx-mod-http-xslt-filter_1.14.2-2+deb10u4_amd64.deb ...\r\nUnpacking libnginx-mod-http-xslt-filter (1.14.2-2+deb10u4) ...\r\nSelecting previously unselected package libnginx-mod-mail.\r\nPreparing to unpack .../24-libnginx-mod-mail_1.14.2-2+deb10u4_amd64.deb ...\r\nUnpacking libnginx-mod-mail (1.14.2-2+deb10u4) ...\r\nSelect  etc

Open port 80 for web traffic

By default, only SSH connections are opened when you create a Linux VM in Azure. Use az vm open-port to open TCP port 80 for use with the NGINX web server:

az vm open-port --port 80 --resource-group mygroupname --name mytestvm

check that it's working

Put the IP address from the output above (or use the portal to find it) into your browser to see if you can connect,. If so, then great! you've just built a web server.

Delete everything

You can't delete your how resource group, but luckily we used tags to create the VM so we can just delete resource by tag.

You can use the portal to delete these resources, but if here are commands to do it with the CLI. You can delete things by name, like this

 az vm delete \
  --resource-group mygroup \
  --name myvm

but every resource has a unique ID, and can be deteled using that ID with the command az resource delete --ids IDVALUE You can get those IDs using az resource list...

# list all resources just created  (change the tag to match what you used if necessary)
az resource list --tag activity=cli_tutorial

# The CLI can filter and change the format of it's output
# list ONLY the resource IDs using the "query" and tabular output
az resource list --tag activity=cli_tutorial --query "[].id" -o table

# delete them all using a shell loop (tsv does not output a header line)
IDS=$(az resource list --tag activity=cli_tutorial --query "[].id" -o tsv)
for id in $IDS; do az resource delete --ids $id; done

Complete example commands (using my resource group)

az vm create \
  --resource-group ccf22_billspat \
  --name billspat-tutorial-vm \
  --image Debian \
  --public-ip-sku Standard \
  --admin-username billspat \
  --tags 'activity=cli_tutorial' \
  --generate-ssh-keys

# copy and paste the output of that

az vm run-command invoke \
   --resource-group ccf22_billspat \
   --name billspat-tutorial-vm \
   --command-id RunShellScript \
   --scripts "sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install -y nginx"

az vm open-port --port 80 --resource-group ccf22_billspat --name billspat-tutorial-vm

# list all resources just created 
az resource list --tag activity=cli_tutorial

# list ONLY the resource IDs using the "query" and tabular output
az resource list --tag activity=cli_tutorial --query "[].id" -o table

# delete them all using a shell loop (tsv does not output a header line)
IDS=$(az resource list --tag activity=cli_tutorial --query "[].id" -o tsv)
for id in $IDS; do az resource delete --ids $id; done

bonus points: set shell variables for the resource group and name and use them in the commands. For example 

RG=ccf22_billspat
VMNAME=billspat-tutorial-vm
az vm create \
  --resource-group $RG \
  --name $VMNAME \
  --image Debian \
  --public-ip-sku Standard \
  --admin-username billspat \
  --tags 'activity=cli_tutorial' \
  --generate-ssh-keys

# ... do other stuff, then delete

 az vm delete \
  --resource-group $RG \
  --name $VMNAME

References: