Authentication in Azure Management Libraries for Java

If you are looking for general documentation on how to use the management libraries, please visit here

To use the APIs in the Azure Management Libraries for Java, as the first step you need to create an authenticated client. This document is to introduce several possible approaches for authentication.

Getting Started

• Prerequisites
• Simple Authentication
  • Preparing TokenCredential
  • Preparing AzureProfile
  • Authenticating with default HttpPipeline
• Advanced Authentication
  • Preparing HttpPipelinePolicy
  • Preparing HttpClient
  • Authenticating with custom HttpPipeline

Prerequisites

• An Azure tenant for Graph RBAC.
• An Azure subscription for resource management.
• A Microsoft Entra service principal. You can create a service principal via Azure Portal, Azure CLI or Azure Powershell.

Simple Authentication

If you want to authenticate as simple as possible, you need to prepare TokenCredential and AzureProfile as below.

Preparing TokenCredential

• The TokenCredential is an interface in the azure-core package for credentials that can provide a token.
• Azure Identity offers multiple implementations of the TokenCredential class in the azure-identity package. To learn more, see credentials in Azure Identity.

Sample code to create a simple ManagedIdentityCredential:

ManagedIdentityCredential managedIdentityCredential = new ManagedIdentityCredentialBuilder()
    // client ID is optional
    .clientId("<YOUR_CLIENT_ID>")
    .build();

The value of AZURE_AUTHORITY_HOST can be set via AzureAuthorityHosts or AzureEnvironment::getActiveDirectoryEndpoint.

Preparing AzureProfile

• The AzureProfile is a class holding AzureEnvironment, subscriptionId, tenantId to configure the requests sending to wire.
• The subscriptionId is mandatory for most resource management while the tenantId would be required only for Graph RBAC. They can be set via environment variables.

variable name	value
AZURE_TENANT_ID	id of the principal's Microsoft Entra tenant
AZURE_SUBSCRIPTION_ID	id of the subscription for the Azure resources

Sample code to create a AzureProfile:

// AzureProfile profile = new AzureProfile(AzureCloud.AZURE_PUBLIC_CLOUD);
AzureProfile profile = new AzureProfile("<YOUR_TENANT_ID>", "<YOUR_SUBSCRIPTION_ID>", AzureCloud.AZURE_PUBLIC_CLOUD);

The sample code assumes global Azure. Please change AzureEnvironment.AZURE variable if otherwise.

Sample code for Azure Germany, with EnvironmentCredential:

AzureProfile profile = new AzureProfile(AzureCloud.AZURE_CHINA_CLOUD);
EnvironmentCredential credential = new EnvironmentCredentialBuilder()
    .authorityHost(profile.getEnvironment().getActiveDirectoryEndpoint())
    .build();

Authenticating with default HttpPipeline

Once the TokenCredential and AzureProfile are ready, you can move forward with below authenticating code. It helps build http pipeline internally with default configuration.

AzureResourceManager azure = AzureResourceManager.authenticate(credential, profile).withDefaultSubscription();

The Authenticated class provides access to a subset of Azure APIs that do not require a specific subscription. If the profile does not contain a subscription, you can select a subscription via Authenticated::subscriptions. Similarly, you can select a tenant via Authenticated::tenants.

AzureResourceManager.Authenticated authenticated = AzureResourceManager.authenticate(credential, profile);
String subscriptionId = authenticated.subscriptions().list().iterator().next().subscriptionId();
AzureResourceManager azure = authenticated.withSubscription(subscriptionId);

Advanced Authentication

If you want to take full control of Azure client, you could build your own http pipeline for authentication.

Preparing HttpPipelinePolicy

• The HttpPipelinePolicy is an interface that process provided request context and invokes the next policy. To learn more, see policies in Azure Core and policies in Azure Management Libraries for Java.

Preparing HttpClient

• The HttpClient is a generic interface for sending HTTP requests and getting responses.
• azure-core-http-netty provides a Netty derived HTTP client.
• azure-core-http-okhttp provides an OkHttp derived HTTP client.

Authenticating with custom HttpPipeline

Once your custom configurations are ready, you can move forward with AzureResourceManager::configure.

AzureResourceManager azure = AzureResourceManager.configure()
    .withPolicy(customPolicy)
    .withRetryPolicy(customRetryPolicy)
    .withHttpClient(httpClient)
    .authenticate(credential, profile)
    .withDefaultSubscription();