Quickstart: Connect to Azure Government with Azure CLI

Microsoft Azure Government delivers a dedicated cloud with world-class security and compliance, enabling US government agencies and their partners to transform their workloads to the cloud. To manage your Azure Government cloud workloads and applications you can connect to Azure Government using different tools, as described in the following video.

This quickstart shows how to use the Azure CLI to access and start managing resources in Azure Government. If you don't have an Azure Government subscription, create a free account before you begin.

Prerequisites

• Review Guidance for developers.
  This article discusses Azure Government's unique URLs and endpoints for managing your environment. You must know about these endpoints in order to connect to Azure Government.
• Review Compare Azure Government and global Azure and click on a service of interest to see variations between Azure Government and global Azure.

Install Azure CLI

Install the Azure CLI locally by following the instructions in Install the Azure CLI.

In Azure Government, there is no equivalent to Azure Cloud Shell that you can find in the Azure portal.

Connect with Azure CLI

Connect to Azure Government by setting the cloud with the name AzureUSGovernment.

az cloud set --name AzureUSGovernment

Once the cloud has been set, you can continue logging in:

az login

When you type login, a browser is launched for you to log in. Choose your Azure Government account and log in with appropriate credentials.

Confirm

To confirm the cloud has correctly been set to AzureUSGovernment, run:

az cloud list --output table

The isActive flag for the AzureUSGovernment item should be set to true.

List US Government regions

You use the same command as for global Azure.

az account list-locations

Next steps

This quickstart showed you how to use CLI to connect to Azure Government. Once you are connected to Azure Government, you may want to explore Azure services. Make sure you check out the variations, described in Compare Azure Government and global Azure. To learn more about Azure services, continue to the Azure documentation.