Using Out-GridView to simplify selecting the region when managing Microsoft Azure with PowerShell
You've signed up for a Microsoft Azure account and you've installed the Azure Resource Manager PowerShell cmdlets on your computer.
1Install-Module -Name AzureRM -Force
You login to Azure from PowerShell. You'll normally see most people use Login-AzureRmAccount
, but
that command is an alias (Login isn't an approved verb).
1Get-Alias -Definition Add-AzureRmAccount
Login to Azure and provide the account login information when prompted:
1Add-AzureRmAccount
Several of the cmdlets in the Azure Resource Manager PowerShell module require a location (a region) to be specified when creating things. To me, showing the regions in the PowerShell console, figuring out which region I want, and then storing it in a variable is a bit haphazard.
1Get-AzureRmLocation
I've found that using Out-GridView
makes the process simpler:
1$Region = (
2 Get-AzureRmLocation |
3 Sort-Object -Property Location |
4 Select-Object -Property Location, Displayname |
5 Out-GridView -OutputMode Single -Title 'Select an Azure Region'
6).Location
Now the region that I selected is stored in a variable that I can use when creating items in Azure:
1$Region
Although the Out-GridView
cmdlet existed in PowerShell version 2.0, you'll need PowerShell version
3.0 to use it as shown in this blog article. The OutputMode
parameter of Out-GridView
which is
used in this blog article was added in PowerShell version 3.0. Also, Out-GridView
can only be used
on operating systems with a GUI (it cannot be used on server core).
As far as I know, there's no way to set a default region in Azure like there is with the AWS
Initialize-AWSDefaultConfiguration
cmdlet. I guess if you really wanted to set a default, you
could always use
$PSDefaultParameterValues
to set a default value for the Location
parameter for the cmdlets that require it.
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