create role assignment azure cli

Using the Azure CLI To Update and Manage User Permissions

The Azure CLI is a great tool for scripting updates to user permissions. In this guide, we'll walk through the basics of roles and groups and the common commands.

If you need to make user permission updates in an automated way, the Azure CLI can be a great option. In this article, we will be outlining the two main sources of user permissions, roles and groups, and how they intersect.

With a combination of roles and groups, you can maintain granular permissions across many different projects while adhering to the principle of least privilege .

Understanding Roles with Azure RBAC

Azure roles are a flexible way to designate user permissions. With Azure RBAC (role-based access control), you can unlock access to certain resources and actions by assigning a user to a certain role, which comes with an accompanying set of permissions.

These are some examples of common built-in roles: 

• Contributor: Can create and manage Azure resources
• Owner: Access to all resources and can extend access to others
• Reader: Can view only existing Azure resources
• User Access Administrator: Can manage access to Azure resources

You can narrow access further by assigning a user with a role in relation to a specific scope (e.g. resource group, application id, etc.). If you need a unique combination of permissions and expect to have similar use cases in the future, you can also create custom roles by providing either a JSON role definition file or a PSRoleDefinition object as input.

Assigning Roles with the Azure CLI

You will likely need to update someone’s role if they are new to your organization or have been assigned to a new project; or inversely, if they are leaving or no longer need access. Here are the steps for making these changes with the Azure CLI.

Adding a Role to a User

To assign a role to a user in Azure, you can use the “ az role assignment create ” command. You have to specify three components, the assignee, the role, and the resource groups or scope of access. In the following example, we’re assigning Reader access (role definition) to user John Smith for the scope of a certain resource group.

Removing a Role from a User

Next, to remove the role from the same user, we would use the “ az role assignment delete ” command. This command uses the exact same parameters:

These commands should enable you to make these role updates manually, or script a repeatable workflow for new employees or new projects.

Understanding Groups in Azure 

In GCP or AWS, Identify Access Management (IAM) groups are a way to extend access and authorization services/APIs to a team. Groups in Azure serve the same purpose, but Azure is slightly different in that groups are created directly using Azure’s Active Directory (AD). 

You can create a new group using the command “ az ad group create ” , and specify a display name and a mail nickname. Here’s an example:

Management of IAM groups in Azure involves the same kinds of tasks you would perform in typical user groups, whether it’s adding or deleting individual users, giving them specific levels of IAM permissions, or managing groups of users as a whole, among many others.

For example, you can assign a group with a certain role for a certain scope or resource group. To do this, you’ll first need to get the object ID for the group using this command:

The object ID will be a string of numbers in this format:

“xxxxxxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxxxxxxxxxx”

Now that you have the group ID, you can use the “ az role assignment create ” command to assign a role to that group:

The combination of user roles and group roles allows for organizations to have a flexible and secure solution for permissions as your company grows or projects change.

Adding or Removing a Users to Groups

If you want to add a user to a group, you’ll need to run the “ az ad group member add ”   command. You will need to plug in values for a group parameter (either the specific group id or display name) and a member-id parameter.

Here is an example of that command:

Removing a member from a group uses the same parameters, and uses the “ az ad group member remove ” command instead:

You can also use the same parameters with the “ az ad group member check ” command to check whether the member was removed from the group.

Automate Permission Updates with Blink

Most likely, as your organization grows, changing and updating permissions and policies will take up more time. Instead of having to look up the specific command for each of these actions, you could use a low-code tool like Blink to handle tasks like this in a couple clicks.

Get started with Blink today to see how easy automation can be.

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How to find all the Azure Built-In Roles for Azure RBAC with Azure CLI, PowerShell, Docs, or AzAdvertizer

Here are a bunch of ways you can find which roles are built into Azure. This will come in super handy when you need to assign a role to a service principal or user with Azure CLI commands like this:

• Query the big honking json
• Query all, but only return Name and Id in a nice table
• Filter by name contains:

This one filters for roles with “Map” in the name:

Azure PowerShell

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/module/az.resources/get-azroledefinition?view=azps-3.8.0

This page has all the built in roles: https://docs.microsoft.com/azure/role-based-access-control/built-in-roles

AzAdvertizer

Just found this site today by Julian Hayward. It’s a great way to find roles

https://www.azadvertizer.net/azrolesadvertizer_all.html

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Azure custom roles

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If the Azure built-in roles don't meet the specific needs of your organization, you can create your own custom roles. Just like built-in roles, you can assign custom roles to users, groups, and service principals at management group, subscription, and resource group scopes.

Custom roles can be shared between subscriptions that trust the same Microsoft Entra tenant. There is a limit of 5,000 custom roles per tenant. (For Microsoft Azure operated by 21Vianet, the limit is 2,000 custom roles.) Custom roles can be created using the Azure portal, Azure PowerShell, Azure CLI, or the REST API.

Steps to create a custom role

Here are the basic steps to create a custom role.

Determine the permissions you need.

When you create a custom role, you need to know the actions that are available to define your permissions. Typically, you start with an existing built-in role and then modify it for your needs. You will add the actions to the Actions or NotActions properties of the role definition . If you have data actions, you will add those to the DataActions or NotDataActions properties.

For more information, see the next section How to determine the permissions you need .

Decide how you want to create the custom role.

You can create custom roles using Azure portal , Azure PowerShell , Azure CLI , or the REST API .

Create the custom role.

The easiest way is to use the Azure portal. For steps on how to create a custom role using the Azure portal, see Create or update Azure custom roles using the Azure portal .

Test the custom role.

Once you have your custom role, you have to test it to verify that it works as you expect. If you need to make adjustments later, you can update the custom role.

How to determine the permissions you need

Azure has thousands of permissions that you can potentially include in your custom role. Here are some methods that can help you determine the permissions you will want to add to your custom role:

Look at existing built-in roles .

You might want to modify an existing role or combine permissions used in multiple roles.

List the Azure services you want to grant access to.

Determine the resource providers that map to the Azure services .

Azure services expose their functionality and permissions through resource providers . For example, the Microsoft.Compute resource provider supplies virtual machine resources and the Microsoft.Billing resource provider supplies subscription and billing resources. Knowing the resource providers can help you narrow down and determine the permissions you need for your custom role.

When you create a custom role using the Azure portal, you can also determine the resource providers by searching for keywords. This search functionality is described in Create or update Azure custom roles using the Azure portal .

Search the available permissions to find permissions you want to include.

When you create a custom role using the Azure portal, you can search for permissions by keyword. For example, you can search for virtual machine or billing permissions. You can also download all of the permissions as a CSV file and then search this file. This search functionality is described in Create or update Azure custom roles using the Azure portal .

Custom role example

The following shows what a custom role looks like as displayed using Azure PowerShell in JSON format. This custom role can be used for monitoring and restarting virtual machines.

The following shows the same custom role as displayed using Azure CLI.

Custom role properties

The following table describes what the custom role properties mean.

Permission strings are case-insensitive. When you create your custom roles, the convention is to match the case that you see for permissions in Azure resource provider operations .

Wildcard permissions

Actions , NotActions , DataActions , and NotDataActions support wildcards ( * ) to define permissions. A wildcard ( * ) extends a permission to everything that matches the action string you provide. For example, suppose that you wanted to add all the permissions related to Azure Cost Management and exports. You could add all of these action strings:

Instead of adding all of these strings, you could just add a wildcard string. For example, the following wildcard string is equivalent to the previous five strings. This would also include any future export permissions that might be added.

It's recommended that you specify Actions and DataActions explicitly instead of using the wildcard ( * ) character. The additional access and permissions granted through future Actions or DataActions may be unwanted behavior using the wildcard.

Who can create, delete, update, or view a custom role

Just like built-in roles, the AssignableScopes property specifies the scopes that the role is available for assignment. The AssignableScopes property for a custom role also controls who can create, delete, update, or view the custom role.

Even if a role is renamed, the role ID does not change. If you are using scripts or automation to create your role assignments, it's a best practice to use the unique role ID instead of the role name. Therefore, if a role is renamed, your scripts are more likely to work.

Find role assignments to delete a custom role

Before you can delete a custom role, you must remove any role assignments that use the custom role. If you try to delete a custom role with role assignments, you get the message: There are existing role assignments referencing role (code: RoleDefinitionHasAssignments) .

Here are steps to help find the role assignments before deleting a custom role:

• List the custom role definition .
• In the AssignableScopes section, get the management groups, subscriptions, and resource groups.
• Iterate over the AssignableScopes and list the role assignments .
• Remove the role assignments that use the custom role.
• If you are using Microsoft Entra Privileged Identity Management , remove eligible custom role assignments.
• Delete the custom role .

For information about how to find unused custom roles, see Symptom - No more role definitions can be created .

Custom role limits

The following list describes the limits for custom roles.

• Each tenant can have up to 5000 custom roles.
• Microsoft Azure operated by 21Vianet can have up to 2000 custom roles for each tenant.
• You cannot set AssignableScopes to the root scope ( "/" ).
• You cannot use wildcards ( * ) in AssignableScopes . This wildcard restriction helps ensure a user can't potentially obtain access to a scope by updating the role definition.
• You can have only one wildcard in an action string.
• You can define only one management group in AssignableScopes of a custom role.
• Azure Resource Manager doesn't validate the management group's existence in the role definition's AssignableScopes .
• Custom roles with DataActions can't be assigned at the management group scope.
• You can create a custom role with DataActions and one management group in AssignableScopes . You can't assign the custom role at the management group scope itself; however, you can assign the custom role at the scope of the subscriptions within the management group. This can be helpful if you need to create a single custom role with DataActions that needs to be assigned in multiple subscriptions, instead of creating a separate custom role for each subscription.

For more information about custom roles and management groups, see What are Azure management groups? .

Input and output formats

To create a custom role using the command line, you typically use JSON to specify the properties you want for the custom role. Depending on the tools you use, the input and output formats will look slightly different. This section lists the input and output formats depending on the tool.

Azure PowerShell

To create a custom role using Azure PowerShell, you must provide following input.

To update a custom role using Azure PowerShell, you must provide the following input. Note that the Id property has been added.

The following shows an example of the output when you list a custom role using Azure PowerShell and the ConvertTo-Json command.

To create or update a custom role using Azure CLI, you must provide following input. This format is the same format when you create a custom role using Azure PowerShell.

The following shows an example of the output when you list a custom role using Azure CLI.

To create or update a custom role using the REST API, you must provide following input. This format is the same format that gets generated when you create a custom role using the Azure portal.

The following shows an example of the output when you list a custom role using the REST API.

• Tutorial: Create an Azure custom role using Azure PowerShell
• Tutorial: Create an Azure custom role using Azure CLI
• Understand Azure role definitions
• Troubleshoot Azure RBAC

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az role assignment create: IndexError: list index out of range #21336

sycao5 commented Feb 17, 2022

yonzhan commented Feb 17, 2022

Sorry, something went wrong.

jiasli commented Feb 18, 2022

No branches or pull requests

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Azure cli -az role assignment

Im trying to assign the Databricks access connector to storahe account as the storage blob data contributor using this script

But it does not work! I tried to debug by getting the outputs one by one. first out put of $accessConnector variable is successful I can see the detailed data, including the IdentityPrincipalId but then second output $accessConnectorObjectId of this ariable is empty. I can get it therefore it results in error

Access Connector Object ID: ERROR: argument --assignee: expected one argument

How can I fix this?

• azure-resource-manager

• if you run (Get-AzDatabricksAccessConnector -ResourceGroupName $rgName -Name $acName).Identity.PrincipalId.Count using the correct values for $rgName and $acName what do you get? –  Santiago Squarzon Commented May 7 at 18:56
• within the function or seperatly? –  Greencolor Commented May 7 at 19:03
• separately, cause the error implies that either $accessConnectorObjectId is null or has more than 1 value –  Santiago Squarzon Commented May 7 at 19:04
• 1 ahhh i think i know where your issue is :P you're using Identity.PrincipalId in your code and the actual property name should be IdentityPrincipalId (no dots, no nested property) its a typo ;) –  Santiago Squarzon Commented May 7 at 19:36
• 1 please provide the answer, you are right haha –  Greencolor Commented May 7 at 19:50

The issue is caused by a typo in $accessConnector.Identity.PrincipalId , looking at Outputs from the Get-AzDatabricksAccessConnector documentation we can see that the cmdlet outputs an object implementing the IAccessConnector Interface and, if we look at the properties that for that interface we can see that the property name is .IdentityPrincipalId instead of .Identity.PrincipalId (a nested object with property .PrincipalId under .Identity basically). So you were actually getting null for referencing a member that doesn't exist in your object and in consequence that error from the az CLI.

So, the fix of the issue:

Aside from that, I'd recommend you to use New-AzRoleAssignment here, it would have given you a much better error message that would've helped debugging this problem much faster:

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