How to use AzureCliCredential in a Container

This solution no longer works with latest Azure SDK libraries. Please see the issue here to follow along with the conversation: Azure/azure-sdk-for-net#19167

AzureCliCredential is a new credential type in Azure.Identity. It allows your code to use the Azure CLI to generate bearer tokens to be used by other Azure SDK clients.

For example, the following code news up an AzureCliCredential and passes it to the Azure Key Vault KeyClient, which in turn will call the GetToken method on the AzureCliCredential class when the first method is called that requires an AAD token.

var cred = new AzureCliCredential();
var client = new KeyClient(new Uri("https://jongkv.vault.azure.net"), cred);
var key = await client.GetKeyAsync("key1");

If you want to run this code in a container, then you need to install the Azure CLI and mount a volume to your ${HOME}/.azure folder for Linux and ${USERPROFILE}/.azure folder for Windows.

Azure CLI Setup

1. Install the Azure CLI
2. Run az login in the same host OS that you will use for development. So, if you use WSL2, then run this in a WSL2 terminal. If you use Git Bash, then run this there. The Azure CLI will cache tokens locally in ${HOME}/.azure that will be used by AzureCliCredential.

Dockerfile

Here's how you install the Azure CLI with one line of Dockerfile code:

RUN curl -sL https://aka.ms/InstallAzureCLIDeb | bash

See Dockerfile for full code.

This example is for .NET and Linux only. If you want to see this working in other langs or Windows, then please file an issue.

docker-compose.yml

If you only install the Azure CLI, you will be required to az login in the container. To have the container honor your host machines az login, then you need to expose the .azure folder on your host to your container.

Here's how to do that in docker-compose.yml

Linux:

volumes: 
   - "${HOME}/.azure:/root/.azure"

Windows:

volumes: 
   - "${USERPROFILE}/.azure:/root/.azure"

See docker-compose.yml for full code Linux, and docker-compose.windows.yml for full code Windows.

docker-compose up --build

Linux

Run docker-compose up --build your AzureCliCredential code will now work.

Windows

Windows handles the user's home directory differently than Linux, so you need to use ${USERPROFILE} instead of ${HOME} in your docker-compose call.

Run docker-compose -f docker-compose.windows.yml up --build your AzureCliCredential code will now work.

Running AzureCliCredential in Kubernetes

I'm running Docker Desktop and WSL2. The following is for that configuration. If you are using a different setup and can't get this to work, then let me know and I should be able to help you get it all setup.

Standard Kubernetes hostPath based volume mounts do not currently work with Docker Desktop and WSL2, so you need to do the following:

Create a directory in the /mnt/wsl folder to mount to, then mount from ${HOME}/.azure to that folder. I don't exactly know why this is required, but it works. Here's more info if you are interested in researching it: Kubernetes Volumes not correctly mounted with WSL2

mkdir /mnt/wsl/.azure
sudo mount --bind ${HOME}/.azure /mnt/wsl/.azure

Then in your Kubernetes config file you specify the mount path like this:

volumes:
   - hostPath:
      path: /run/desktop/mnt/host/wsl/.azure
      type: Directory
      name: cli

You can find the entire file example here: .k8s/k8s.yml

Then run kubeclt apply -f .k8s and you will see key1 outputed to your logs.

You can remove the mount with the following:

sudo umount /mnt/wsl/.azure