Azure Active Directory (Azure AD): Installation & Configuration

The Pulumi AzureAD provider uses the AzureAD SDK to manage and provision resources. To provision resources with the Pulumi AzureAD provider, you need to have Azure credentials. Your Azure credentials are never sent to Pulumi.com. Pulumi uses the Azure SDK and the credentials in your environment to authenticate requests from your computer to Azure.

Installation

The AzureAD provider is available as a package in all Pulumi languages:

• JavaScript/TypeScript: @pulumi/azuread
• Python: pulumi-azuread
• Go: github.com/pulumi/pulumi-azuread/sdk/v4/go/azuread
• .NET: Pulumi.AzureAD
• Java: com.pulumi.azuread

Credentials

Pulumi can authenticate to Azure via several methods:

• Azure CLI
• OpenID Connect (OIDC)
• Service Principal with a client secret or certificate
• Managed Service Identity (MSI)

If you’re running the Pulumi CLI locally, in a developer scenario, we recommend using the Azure CLI. For team environments, particularly in Continuous Integration, one of the other options is strongly recommended.

Authenticate using the CLI

Log in to the Azure CLI and Pulumi will automatically use your credentials:

$ az login
A web browser has been opened at https://login.microsoftonline.com/organizations/oauth2/v2.0/authorize. Please continue the login in the web browser. If no web browser is available or if the web browser fails to open, use device code flow with `az login --use-device-code`.

Do as instructed to log in. After completed, az login will return and you are ready to go.

The Azure CLI, and thus Pulumi, will use the Default Subscription by default. You can override the subscription by setting your subscription ID to the id output from az account list’s output:

$ az account list

Pick out the <id> from the list and run:

$ az account set --subscription=<id>

Authenticate with OpenID Connect (OIDC)

OIDC allows you to establish a trust relationship between Azure and another identity provider such as GitHub or Azure DevOps. Once established, your program can exchange an ID token issued by the identity provider for an Azure token. Your Pulumi program running in the identity provider’s service, for instance, GitHub Actions CI or Azure DevOps Pipelines, can then access Azure, without storing any secrets in GitHub.

OIDC Azure Configuration

To configure the trust relationship in Azure, please refer to this guide. This needs to be set up only once.

OIDC Pulumi Provider Configuration

To use OIDC, either set the Pulumi configuration useOidc via pulumi config set azuread:useOidc true or set the environment variable ARM_USE_OIDC to “true”.

Next, supply the Pulumi provider with the ID token to exchange for an Azure token. This step depends on the service (identity provider) your program will run on.

• On GitHub, you don’t need to configure anything since GitHub sets the relevant environment variables by default and the Pulumi provider reads them automatically.
• Other identity providers offer a way to access the ID token. For instance, in GitLab CI/CD jobs, the ID token is available via the environment variable GITLAB_OIDC_TOKEN. Configure the Pulumi provider to use the ID token by assigning it to the Pulumi configuration azuread:oidcToken or the environment variable ARM_OIDC_TOKEN.

Finally, configure the client and tenant IDs of your Azure Active Directory application. Refer to the above Azure documentation on how to retrieve the IDs, and set them via Pulumi config as azuread:clientId and azuread:tenantId or via environment variables as ARM_CLIENT_ID and ARM_TENANT_ID.

Authenticate using a Service Principal

A Service Principal is an application in Azure Active Directory with a client ID and a tenant ID, exactly like the one used in the OIDC scenario. In this scenario, instead of a pre-configured trust relationship, a client secret is used to authenticate with Azure.

Create your Service Principal and get your tokens

To use a Service Principal, you must first create one. If you already have one, skip this section.

You can create a Service Principal using the Azure CLI, using the Azure Cloud Shell, or using the Azure Portal.

After creating a Service Principal, you will obtain three important tokens:

• appId is the client ID
• password is the client secret
• tenant is the tenant ID

For example, a common Service Principal as displayed by the Azure CLI looks something like this:

{
  "appId": "WWWWWWWW-WWWW-WWWW-WWWW-WWWWWWWWWWWW",
  "displayName": "ServicePrincipalName",
  "name": "http://ServicePrincipalName",
  "password": "XXXXXXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXXXXXXXXXX",
  "tenant": "YYYYYYYY-YYYY-YYYY-YYYY-YYYYYYYYYYYY"
}

Make tokens available to Pulumi

Once you have the Service Principal’s authorization tokens, choose one of the ways below to make them available to Pulumi:

Set configuration using pulumi config

Remember to pass --secret when setting clientSecret so that it is properly encrypted:

```bash
$ pulumi config set azuread:clientId <clientID>
$ pulumi config set azuread:clientSecret <clientSecret> --secret
$ pulumi config set azuread:tenantId <tenantID>
```

Set configuration using environment variables

$ export ARM_CLIENT_ID=<YOUR_ARM_CLIENT_ID>
$ export ARM_CLIENT_SECRET=<YOUR_ARM_CLIENT_SECRET>
$ export ARM_TENANT_ID=<YOUR_ARM_TENANT_ID>

$ export ARM_CLIENT_ID=<YOUR_ARM_CLIENT_ID>
$ export ARM_CLIENT_SECRET=<YOUR_ARM_CLIENT_SECRET>
$ export ARM_TENANT_ID=<YOUR_ARM_TENANT_ID>

> $env:ARM_CLIENT_ID = "<YOUR_ARM_CLIENT_ID>"
> $env:ARM_CLIENT_SECRET = "<YOUR_ARM_CLIENT_SECRET>"
> $env:ARM_TENANT_ID = "<YOUR_ARM_TENANT_ID>"

Configuration options

Use pulumi config set azuread:<option> or pass options to the constructor of new azuread.Provider.