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Welcome to another release of the Azure CLI! In this release, we will be sharing with you the latest feature improvements that will help boost in tool productivity. This includes:

1. A newly refined error messages that is more human readable and legible.
2. A new in-tool upgrade mechanism so you no longer must leave the tool to keep every dependency in sync and intact.
3. A way to remember contextual information between Az CLI commands. This helps reduce the command length by eliminating parameters that are repeated in sequential CLI commands.
4. A new –query-examples option that provide you contextual JMES query recommendations to help you get started with command querying.

You can download the latest official release from the Azure CLI page or the dev build from the GitHub Azure CLI homepage

 

New human readable error outputs with AI powered recommendations:

When we talk to CLI customers, we often hear that understanding output errors is difficult.  

As our first approach, we looked at client-side syntactical errors. We found that these are primarily caused by misspelling commands or typing in commands which do not exist for a particular resource. In partnership with our User Experience and Design teams we landed on a new 3 line output model of:

1. What happened?
2. Try this…
3. Learn more…

We think that the additional information provided by ‘Try this’ and ‘Learn more’ can effectively guide you towards the correct commands and parameters.

 

In the screenshots below, you can see that the new error output is much cleaner and simpler; most importantly, it’s now human readable. In the case where the error message alone doesn’t provide sufficient context to unblock you on the issue, we hope you can leverage the follow up in tool recommendations that are made readily available to you:

 

 Figure 1: Examples of new error output with contextual recommendations

 

 

 Figure 2: Coming Soon: Prototype with better colorization and templating design

 

Convenient in tool az upgrade:

Az upgrade is another new feature that further enhances your in-tool convenience. The command name itself elaborates on what it does — enabling you to upgrade to the latest CLI version without having to leave the tool. To try it out, simply type in az upgrade in your terminal and the tool will auto-upgrade your core CLI version and all of your installed extensions to the latest version on your behalf, while checking and maintaining all the package dependencies.

 

Under the hood, az upgrade uses the package manager commands to perform the updates. Currently there are different commands you need to remember depending upon your operating system and package manager, for instance, sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install –only-upgrade -y azure-cli for deb packages on Ubuntu, sudo yum update azure-cli for RPM packages on CentOS,  and brew update && brew upgrade azure-cli for homebrew packages on macOS. Now you can simply use a single az upgrade command regardless of the platform you are using the Azure CLI.

 

 Figure 3: UX of the new in tool az upgrade

 

Once you are on the latest version of the Azure CLI, you can also enable automatic upgrade.  To enable it simply apply the single configuration option via az config auto-upgrade.enable = yes. That way you’ll never have to worry about keeping up with the latest version of the tool. The Azure CLI will check new versions and prompt you with an update after any command finishes running once the update is available.

 

The prompt message and output messages during upgrade may interrupt your command result if it is assigned to some variable or in an automated flow. To avoid interruption, you can use az config auto-upgrade.prompt = no to allow the update to happen automatically without confirmation and only show warnings and errors during the upgrade. By default, all installed extensions will also be updated. You can disable extension update via az config auto-upgrade.all = no.

 

Note: Please wait for az upgrade to complete before proceeding to the next set of commands, else the new versions of the CLI (+extensions) may have breaking changes.

 

Advanced contextual support with az config param-persist:

We recently released a new way to set configuration options so that it’d be simpler and more intuitive as you work with the tool. We further extended its capabilities with yet another experimental feature named az config param-persist. Similar to how one could use the basic config/configure commands to set global static defaults, az config param-persist is a specific configurable mode that implicitly sets defaults in your current working directory for which the values would persist – this eliminates the need for you to re-specify arguments in CLI commands once they’ve been declared. Below is a before vs. after feature comparison:

 

 Figure 4: before & after view of az config param-persist

 

With param-persist enabled on the right, we can see that once the values of resource group, location, and storage account have been specified in previous commands, they can now be omitted from subsequent commands, thereby reducing the number of potential error points when you interact with the tool. We currently support param-persist on a core set of parameters including resource group and vnet across all services as well as location, resource name, storage account support on functions and webapp. If you’re interested in helping us shape its future outlook – whether it be command naming, feature coverage, additional capabilities, and such; please do not hesitate to share your feedback here.

 

Helping you get started with JMES with –query-examples

The Azure CLI supports a mechanism to return specific fields out of the returned JSON object.  This uses JMESPath to specify the query.  While powerful, these queries can be complicated to write. Our last improvement is a new contextual –query-examples capabilities. This is a flag that could be appended to any az <resource> show or list commands for list of JMES query recommendations. This includes examples to query for a specific key, filter the output based on a set of conditions, and query for a set of commonly used functions. When you come across a specific query of interest, please be sure to wrap them in the double quotation marks (“ ”) and append them after the –query flag when performing the actual query. Below are some examples in action:

 

Figure 5: Example usage of –query-examples with az group list

 

Figure 6: Example of filtering/limiting recommendations that contain the texts ostype or resourcegroup

 

Once again, you can further config it with az config to i) limit the max num of inline recommendations with az config set query.max_examples; and ii) define the max length of help string and query string with az config set query.help_len and az config set query.examples_len.

 

One thing to note:  –query and –query-examples provide 2 distinct  functionalities. –query enables you to filter for specific info on the command output whereas –query-examples provide you contextual query recommendations. This is an experimental feature and we would love your feedback here.

 

Follow up with us

We’d love for you to try out these new experiences and share your feedback on their usability and applicability for your day-to-day use cases. All of the above features are here to lower your in tool friction and improve your productivity. If you’re interested, here is where you can learn more about new features in the ever improving Azure CLI.

 

Thank you

The CLI team

 

Brought to you by Dr. Ware, Microsoft Office 365 Silver Partner, Charleston SC.