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Authenticate to Azure with a Microsoft account

  • Article

A Microsoft account is a username (associated with an email and its credentials) that is used to sign in to Microsoft services - such as Azure. A Microsoft account can be associated with one or more Azure subscriptions, with one of those subscriptions being the default.

In this article, you learn how to:

  • Sign in to Azure interactively using a Microsoft account
  • List the account's associated Azure subscriptions (including the default)
  • Set the current subscription

Steps to authenticate with Microsoft account

  1. Open a command line that has access to the Azure CLI.

  2. Run az login without any parameters and follow the instructions to sign in to Azure.

    az login

    Key points:

    • Upon successful sign in, az login displays a list of the Azure subscriptions associated with the logged-in Microsoft account, including the default subscription.

  3. To confirm the current Azure subscription, run az account show.

    az account show

  4. To view all the Azure subscription names and IDs for a specific Microsoft account, run az account list.

    az account list --query "[?user.name=='<microsoft_account_email>'].{Name:name, ID:id, Default:isDefault}" --output Table

    Key points:

    • Replace the <microsoft_account_email> placeholder with the Microsoft account email address whose Azure subscriptions you want to list.
    • With a Live account - such as a Hotmail or Outlook - you might need to specify the fully qualified email address. For example, if your email address is admin@hotmail.com, you might need to replace the placeholder with live.com#admin@hotmail.com.

  5. To use a specific Azure subscription, run az account set.

    az account set --subscription "<subscription_id_or_subscription_name>"

    Key points:

    • Replace the <subscription_id_or_subscription_name> placeholder with the ID or name of the subscription you want to use.
    • Calling az account set doesn't display the results of switching to the specified Azure subscription. However, you can use az account show to confirm that the current Azure subscription has changed.
    • If you run the az account list command from the previous step, you see that the default Azure subscription has changed to the subscription you specified with az account set.

Next steps

Verify the results