After we had a look into ARM Templates overall, I wanted to help you to get your hands on those Templates. For this you can use any editor, even things like notepad. As it is just a declarative form of notation. But to make things easier, I would recommend to use Visual Studio Code, with some Extensions.
If you have not yet installed VS Code or never heard of it … it is about time for it. Some of you may know Visual Studio … the heavy application for developers 🙂 … yeah, this is what I thought in the past too.
But when we talk about VS Code:
Visual Studio Code is a lightweight but powerful source code editor which runs on your desktop and is available for Windows, macOS and Linux. It comes with built-in support for JavaScript, TypeScript and Node.js and has a rich ecosystem of extensions for other languages (such as C++, C#, Java, Python, PHP, Go) and runtimes (such as .NET and Unity).
Source: https://code.visualstudio.com/docs
And here we go … so it is an editor that runs on every platform and can work with everything based on extensions. Sounds like a good choice.
So let’s go an install VS Code:
When you open VS Code for the first time you are ready to go with your first document:
Here you could start to work with your first documents and source codes. But if you want to work with Azure and use it for ARM templates, I recommend to install some Extensions first.
The Marketplace for extensions has grown like hell … but I still have some favorite extensions, I would like to share here.
Azure Tools – this extension will install many other extensions like Azure Storage or even the Azure Account extension. It helps you to easily integrate your online Azure environment into VS Code. After installing this you will see an Azure icon on the left, where you can log-in to Azure and manage your resources:
JSON Tools – With the JSON tools from Erik Lynd you can easily prettify your JSONs by pressing Ctrl+Alt+M:
Azure Resource Manager (ARM) Tools – this is one more extension that will help being faster and get the best out of VS Code. It provides:
With all those extensions installed you can not start … but how?! There are multiple ways. As described in an earlier post you can go and copy from a Repo or your existing Azure Resources. You could also start writing the template from scratch…
But with the installed extensions you are ready to go directly out of VS Code.
Inside a .json file you now can easily type “arm” and a list of snippets will appear that you can use to easily insert whole sections into the template.
On the left side you can see the outline of your ARM Template. That helps managing larger templates as you can go through the resources visually.
In the console area you are able to directly see all issues that exist in your template. This can me a simple missing comma, or a huge syntax error.
So you are all set … happy ARM coding 🙂
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