I do a lot with Raspberry Pis, and sometimes I want all my tools installed in one place so I can use my Pi for everything, rather than flipping back to my Mac.

One thing I use a lot is Azure - funny really as I work for Microsoft! I often use the Azure portal as I prefer UIs to CLIs, but when working on a Pi I regularly use Raspberry Pi OS Lite, so don’t have a browser to use as I’m always in the terminal or VS Code. So I needed the Azure CLI on my Pi.

Hardware

I’m currently doing everything on a Raspberry Pi 4 as I have a few of them (will trade one for a Lamborghini - no low ballers, I know what I have), so have one of these set up with Raspberry Pi OS Lite 32-bit. I’ve not tested this on 64-bit, but I’m guessing it should work.

Pre-requisites

To install the CLI, you can’t just use the apt package - this only currently supports x86, not armhf. Instead it needs to be installed from an install script that installs a raw Python CLI. This has a few dependencies:

• libffi
• Python 3.6 or later
• OpenSSL

Run the following to ensure everything is installed:

sudo apt install libffi-dev python3-dev python3-pip openssl

Install the Azure CLI

Once the pre-requisites are installed, you can use a handy script from Microsoft to install the CLI:

curl -L https://aka.ms/InstallAzureCli | bash

Run this with all the defaults.

This adds the az command to the /home/pi/bin/ folder, and gives you an option to add this to your path, which you should accept. You’ll then need to manually restart your shell or run exec -l $SHELL to restart it.

Login

Once installed, you can log in with az login. It’s smart enough to realize you don’t have a web browser, and take you through the device login path, giving you a code. Head to https://microsoft.com/devicelogin and enter the code given to get logged in!