Azure Developer CLI (azd) – March 2024 Release

Grace Kulin

March 12th, 20243 4

We’re pleased to announce that the March 2024 release (version 1.7.0) 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.

Here’s what’s new in azd:

Sovereign cloud support (azure-dev#976)
Support for third-party container registries (azure-dev#3241)
Visual Studio publish experience for .NET Aspire
Other .NET Aspire enhancements

Sovereign cloud support

We’re excited to offer azd to more developers now by adding support for Azure China Cloud and Azure US Government in addition to the Azure Public cloud! The Azure Public cloud is still the default used if no cloud is specified. The cloud can be configured at the user, project, or environment level.

For full details about how to configure and use azd with Azure China Cloud or Azure US Government, see our docs.

Support for third-party container registries

We now allow pushing container images to external container registries.

To use this feature, you need to manually authenticate to the external container registry before calling azd deploy. To do so, run docker login and authenticate to your external container registry following the setup/configuration of your registry provider.

Here’s an example azure.yaml file pulling from an external container registry:

name: todo-nodejs-mongo-aca
metadata:
  template: todo-nodejs-mongo-aca@0.0.1-beta
services:
  nginx:
    image: docker.io/username/nginx:latest
    host: containerapp

In this example, during azd deploy the container is pulled from docker.io/username/nginx:latest and directly referenced by the container app service.

Visual Studio publish experience for .NET Aspire

A Visual Studio publish experience is now enabled for .NET Aspire applications! This experience is built with azd so you can publish your .NET Aspire apps directly from Visual Studio to any of your currently running azd environments!

Learn more about this change in .NET Aspire’s latest product updates.

Other .NET Aspire enhancements

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

Prompting for parameter resources
Automatically create secrets

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

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:
- Set DOTNET_ENVIRONMENT when producing a manifest (azure-dev#3233)
Bug fixes for azd core:
- Deploying javascript app with Aspire results in error during deploy step (azure-dev#3391)
- Aspire: calling azd infra synth does not produce the autogenerate inputs (azure-dev#3434)

Community contributions

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

john0isaac:
- Add MySQL Bicep to core templates (azure-dev#3334)

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.