Quickstart: Assign an Azure role using Bicep

Azure role-based access control (Azure RBAC) is the way that you manage access to Azure resources. In this quickstart, you create a resource group and grant a user access to create and manage virtual machines in the resource group. This quickstart uses Bicep to grant the access.

Bicep is a domain-specific language (DSL) that uses declarative syntax to deploy Azure resources. It provides concise syntax, reliable type safety, and support for code reuse. Bicep offers the best authoring experience for your infrastructure-as-code solutions in Azure.

Prerequisites

To assign Azure roles and remove role assignments, you must have:

• If you don't have an Azure subscription, create a Trial before you begin.
• Microsoft.Authorization/roleAssignments/write and Microsoft.Authorization/roleAssignments/delete permissions, such as Role Based Access Control Administrator.
• To assign a role, you must specify three elements: security principal, role definition, and scope. For this quickstart, the security principal is you or another user in your directory, the role definition is Virtual Machine Contributor, and the scope is a resource group that you specify.

Review the Bicep file

The Bicep file used in this quickstart is from Azure Quickstart Templates. The Bicep file has two parameters and a resources section. In the resources section, notice that it has the three elements of a role assignment: security principal, role definition, and scope.

@description('Specifies the role definition ID used in the role assignment.')
param roleDefinitionID string

@description('Specifies the principal ID assigned to the role.')
param principalId string

var roleAssignmentName= guid(principalId, roleDefinitionID, resourceGroup().id)
resource roleAssignment 'Microsoft.Authorization/roleAssignments@2021-04-01-preview' = {
  name: roleAssignmentName
  properties: {
    roleDefinitionId: resourceId('Microsoft.Authorization/roleDefinitions', roleDefinitionID)
    principalId: principalId
  }
}

The resource defined in the Bicep file is:

• Microsoft.Authorization/roleAssignments

Deploy the Bicep file

1. Save the Bicep file as main.bicep to your local computer.

2. Deploy the Bicep file using either Azure CLI or Azure PowerShell.

   • CLI
   • PowerShell

   az group create --name exampleRG --location chinanorth
   az deployment group create --resource-group exampleRG --template-file main.bicep --parameters roleDefinitionID=9980e02c-c2be-4d73-94e8-173b1dc7cf3c principalId=<principal-id>
   

When the deployment finishes, you should see a message indicating the deployment succeeded.

Review deployed resources

Use the Azure portal, Azure CLI, or Azure PowerShell to list the deployed resources in the resource group.

az role assignment list --resource-group exampleRG

Get-AzRoleAssignment -ResourceGroupName exampleRG

Clean up resources

When no longer needed, use the Azure portal, Azure CLI, or Azure PowerShell to remove the role assignment. For more information, see Remove Azure role assignments.

Use the Azure portal, Azure CLI, or Azure PowerShell to delete the resource group.

az group delete --name exampleRG

Remove-AzResourceGroup -Name exampleRG

Next steps