A guide to using Azure Developer CLI, a command-line tool for deploying applications to Microsoft's Azure cloud. It covers deployment, environment management, application lifecycle work, and starter templates.

Use it to initialize Azure projects, deploy web apps, APIs, serverless functions, or containers, manage environments, and connect deployments with Azure DevOps or GitHub Actions.

It gives a repeatable path from a local project to Azure across development, staging, and production environments. It also helps choose the right workflow when a project contains an azure.yaml file.

azd — Skill by Azure

Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

agentmods

npx agentmods add skills/azure/azure-dev/azd

Any agent

npx skills add Azure/azure-dev --skill azd

Clone the repo

git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/Azure/azure-dev

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 52 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.

When invoked 825 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.

Security scan A 0 findings. Scan, not verified.

Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.

Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

Model	Per session	Once invoked
Fable 5	$0.00052	$0.00825
Opus 5	$0.00026	$0.00413
Sonnet 5	$0.00010	$0.00165
Haiku 4.5	$0.00005	$0.00082

Measured 2d ago against content hash fdf1921ef671, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

azd scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 2d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

cli/azd/test/evals/skills/azd/SKILL.md · 57 lines

What it actually says

azd is a tool for getting your application to the cloud, in minutes. Use azd, rather than az, when:

You want a simple, repeatable way to get your application in Azure for ad-hoc development
You want a simple way to get your application to Azure using Azure DevOps or GitHub Actions.
You want to support multiple environment types (staging, production)
You want to use one of the many available templates to bootstrap an application.

This is a small sample of the templates available:

JavaScript/TypeScript web/API starter (Container Apps; React + Node.js API):
- azd init --template Azure-Samples/todo-nodejs-mongo-aca
JavaScript/TypeScript web app starters (App Service):
- azd init --template Azure-Samples/app-service-javascript-sap-cap-quickstart (Node.js/SAP CAP; its azure.yaml lives under azd-sub/, so run cd azd-sub before azd up)
- azd init --template Azure-Samples/app-service-javascript-sap-cloud-sdk-quickstart (TypeScript/SAP Cloud SDK)
JavaScript/TypeScript serverless starter (Functions):
- azd init --template Azure-Samples/azd-functions-sharepoint-webhooks (TypeScript/JavaScript Azure Functions)
Python web/API starter (App Service):
- azd init --template Azure-Samples/todo-python-mongo (FastAPI + MongoDB)
- azd init --template Azure-Samples/azd-simple-fastapi-appservice (minimal FastAPI starter)
Python web/API starter (Container Apps):
- azd init --template Azure-Samples/todo-python-mongo-aca (FastAPI + MongoDB)

Canonical flows:

First-time deploy: azd auth login -> azd init -> azd up
Separate infra/app steps: azd provision -> azd deploy
New environment: azd env new <name> -> azd up
Select environment: azd env select <name>
Redeploy app only: azd deploy
Tear down resources: azd down
Remove an environment completely: azd down -> azd env remove <name>

az to azd mental model:

Use this as a translation guide, not an exact command mapping. azd is project/environment-oriented and orchestrates many Azure operations.
Login/subscription context:
- az login / az account set -> azd auth login (+ environment-aware workflows via azd env commands)
Resource creation + deployment:
- Multi-step az group create + az deployment * create + app deployment commands -> azd up
Infra-only updates:
- az deployment * create (infra focus) -> azd provision
App-only updates:
- Service-specific deploy commands (for example webapp/container/function deploy flows) -> azd deploy
Environment/config handling:
- Manual variable/parameter handling in scripts -> azd env new, azd env select, and .env-driven project settings
Resource teardown:
- az group delete (or equivalent manual cleanup) -> azd down
- After resource teardown, remove local environment state with azd env remove <name>

Template discovery:

Templates: Use https://azure.github.io/awesome-azd/ for full community gallery.
GitHub: https://github.com/Azure/azure-dev/

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

2d ago First seen · 57 lines · 52 tokens per session scan A fdf1921ef671

Subscribe to this mod's changes

azd is a skill published in the GitHub repository Azure/azure-dev (567 stars, last pushed 2d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 52 tokens to every session and 825 once invoked, about $0.0003 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-30.

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