How To Login To Azure With a Service Principal

This post will show how to log in to Microsoft Azure using a Service Principal identity and manage resources.

A service principal is an identity created in Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) that is used to authenticate and authorize access to Azure resources. It is similar to a user account, but instead of being associated with a human, it is associated with an application or service.

Create a Service Principal

To create a service principal using Azure CLI, please use the following post, which will guide you and note down the command output. The output will look like this.

{
  "appId": "<app-id>",
  "displayName": "<app-name>",
  "password": "<app-password>",
  "tenant": "<tenant-id>"
}

Login

To log in using a Service Principal, run the following command using the above values.

Note: Use appId for CLIENT_ID, password for CLIENT_SECRET and tenant for TENANT_ID

az login --service-principal -u CLIENT_ID -p CLIENT_SECRET --tenant TENANT_ID

Once logged in with the service principal, you can use Azure CLI, or Azure PowerShell commands to manage Azure resources.