Azure Developer CLI (azd) – April 2024 Release

Grace Kulin

We’re pleased to announce that the April 2024 release (version 1.8.0) of the Azure Developer CLI (azd) is now available. As always, you can learn about how to get started with the Azure Developer CLI by visiting our documentation.

Our team is hard at work planning the future of azd, so this month’s release is a little lighter on features than usual. Still, we’re happy to share that we have some exciting work surrounding AI coming to Microsoft Build. If you haven’t signed up yet, early bird registration is open through April 12 or you can register for free to attend virtually. We look forward to seeing you there!

Here’s what’s new in azd this month:

• .NET Aspire enhancements
• Breaking changes for secrets in Container Apps (azure-dev#3589)

.NET Aspire enhancements

As a part of azd‘s continued partnership with .NET Aspire, we made several noteworthy changes:

• Support for apps with multiple exposed ports (azure-dev#3612)
• Discover export port from the result of dotnet publish (azure-dev#3073)
• Support more input generation in Aspire manifest (azure-dev#3462)

To learn more about these and other .NET Aspire enhancements, check out .NET Aspire’s latest product updates.

Breaking change for securely passing secrets in Container Apps

One of our wonderful community contributors, pamelafox, made an update to enable you to securely pass secrets into container-app modules. The container-app.bicep and container-app-upsert.bicep modules now mark the secrets parameter as secure(), and expect secrets to be an object (instead of an array). You need to reformat your array of [{name: 'secret-name', value: secretValue}, ...] as an object: {'secret-name': secretValue, ...} instead.

Other changes and enhancements

We also added smaller enhancements and fixed issues requested by users that should improve your experience working with the azd. Some notable changes include:

• Features for azd core:
  • Add --from-code flag to azd init (azure-dev#3569)
• Bug fixes for azd core:
  • Fixes trailing comma for todo-nodejs-mongo-aks template’s invalid url in GitHub Action (azure-dev#3388)
  • Fix – Azure Key Vault name generated from Azure Cosmos DB resource is too long (azure-dev#3496)
• Breaking Changes:
  • Update Node.js version for installing azd GitHub Action (azure-dev#3578)
  • Update Node.js version for templates and pipelines (azure-dev#3594)
• Bug fixes for azd with .NET Aspire:
  • Regression for dockerfile.v0 (azure-dev#3649)
  • Set build args for dockerfile (azure-dev#3432)

Community contributions

We’d also like to extend a special thanks to the community contributors of this release:

• mikekistler
  • Fix typo in next-steps.md (azure-dev#3522)

You can use the Azure Developer CLI from:

• Your terminal of choice on Windows, Linux, or macOS.
• Visual Studio Code or GitHub Codespaces by downloading the extension from the Marketplace, or installing it directly from the extension view (Ctrl + Shift + X for Windows or Cmd + Shift + X for macOS) in Visual Studio Code.
• Visual Studio by enabling the preview feature flag.
• You can learn more about the Azure Developer CLI from our official documentation.
• If you run into any problems or have suggestions, file an issue or start a discussion in the Azure Developer CLI repository. You can also try checking out our troubleshooting documentation.

Grace Kulin

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