Tag: Azure

If you are like me and using infrastructure as code to deploy your Azure Infrastructure then using the Azure DevOps Docker task doesn’t work. To use this task you need to know what your Azure Container Registry(ACR) is and have it configured to be able to push your docker images to the registry, but you don’t know that yet. Here I show how you can still use Azure DevOps to push your images to a dynamic ACR.

In my case I am using Terraform to create the Container Registry and with that I pass what I want it to be called. For example ‘prc-acr’ which will generate an ACR with the full login server name ‘prc-acr.azurecr.io’. This can then be used later for sending the images to the correct registry.

When using the official Microsoft Docker Task the documentation asks that your have a Service Connection to your ACR. To do this though you need the registry login server name, username and password to connect, which unless you keep the registry static you will not know. Therefore, you can’t create the connection to then push your images up. I did read some potential methods to dynamically create this connection, but then we need to manage these so they do not get out of control.

To push the image we need only two things, a connection to Azure and where to push the image. The first we can get set up as we know the tenant and subscription we will be deploying to. The connection can be made up by following this guide to connection Azure to Azure DevOps. The other part of where to send the image, we mentioned earlier when we created the ACT in Terraform calling it ‘prc-acr’.

With these details we can use the Azure CLI to push the image to the ACR. First your need to login to the ACR using:

az acr login --name 'prc-acr'

This will connect you into the ACR that was created in Azure. From there you will need to tag your image with the acr login server name with registry name and tag. For example:

docker tag prcImage:latest prc-acr.azurecr.io/prc-registry:latest

This will then tell docker where to push the image to while you are logged in to the Azure Container Registry, which means from there we simply just need to push the image with that tag in the standard docker method:

docker push prc-acr.azurecr.io/prc-registry:latest

Now this is very each and simple as we do not need a connection to the Container Registry, but just a connection to the Azure environment. These details can then be used with the Azure CLI Task as below, where I am passing in the following parameters.

steps:
  - task: AzureCLI@2
    displayName: 'Push Docker Image to ACR'
    inputs:
      azureSubscription: ${{parameters.azureServiceConnection}}
      scriptType: 'ps'
      scriptLocation: 'inlineScript'
      inlineScript: |
        az acr login --name ${{parameters.azureContainerRegistryName}}
        docker tag ${{parameters.dockerImage}}:${{parameters.tagName}} ${{parameters.azureContainerRegistryName}}.azurecr.io/${{parameters.registryName}}:${{parameters.tagName}}
        docker push ${{parameters.azureContainerRegistryName}}.azurecr.io/${{parameters.registryName}}:${{parameters.tagName}}