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Create a resource using a service principal

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If given the necessary permissions, a service principal can create and manage Azure resources just like an account. This tutorial step provides an example of how to create a resource for Azure Storage using a service principal and the following commands:

To sign in with a service principal, you need the appID, tenantID, and password returned in the console output when you created a service principal.

  1. Sign in as the service principal.

    az login --service-principal \
         --username myServicePrincipalID \
         --password myServicePrincipalPassword \
         --tenant myOrganizationTenantID

    Output console:

    [
  {
    "cloudName": "AzureCloud",
    "homeTenantId": "tenantID",
    "id": "mySubscriptionId",
    "isDefault": true,
    "managedByTenants": [],
    "name": "mySubscriptionName",
    "state": "Enabled",
    "tenantId": "tenantID",
    "user": {
      "name": "myServicePrincipalID",
      "type": "servicePrincipal"
    }
  }
]

  2. Create a resource group to hold all resources for the same project.

    az group create --location westus --name myResourceGroupName

  3. Create a storage account.

    For Azure Storage, valid values for the <KIND> parameter are:

    • BlobStorage
    • BlockBlobStorage
    • FileStorage
    • Storage
    • StorageV2
    az storage account create --name myStorageAccountName \
                          --resource-group myResourceGroupName \
                          --kind <KIND> \
                          --sku F0 \
                          --location westus \
                          --yes

  4. Get resource keys, which you use in your code to authenticate to the Azure storage account.

    az storage account keys list --resource-group myResourceGroupName \
                             --account-name myStorageAccountName

    Output Console:

    [
  {
    "creationTime": "2023-09-15T17:29:49.554030+00:00",
    "keyName": "key1",
    "permissions": "FULL",
    "value": "myKeyValue1"
  },
  {
    "creationTime": "2023-09-15T17:29:49.554030+00:00",
    "keyName": "key2",
    "permissions": "FULL",
    "value": "myKeyValue2"
  }
]

Next Steps

Now that you've learned how to create a resource using service principal, proceed to the next step to learn how to reset your service principal credentials.

Reset service principal credentials