To make life easier, I have checked my PowerShell code on Github. Feel free to download them and modify them to your needs.

In this tutorial, I will go over how to get resource groups from Azure REST API. One of the basic CRUD operations, I will perform.

Create a file called Get-AzureResourceGroup.ps1. Let’s create the required variables. Make sure to fill in the required variables from your Azure subscription.

Variables

# Variables
$TenantId = "" # Enter Tenant Id.
$ClientId = "" # Enter Client Id.
$ClientSecret = "" # Enter Client Secret.
$Resource = "https://management.core.windows.net/"
$SubscriptionId = "" # Enter Subscription Id.

Once you have updated the above required values. Let’s make a first REST call to get access token.

We will use the below URL to make a REST call to get access token.

POST https://login.microsoftonline.com/{tenantId}/oauth2/token

Request Access Token

Add the following code to your PowerShell script after variables.

$RequestAccessTokenUri = "https://login.microsoftonline.com/$TenantId/oauth2/token"

$body = "grant_type=client_credentials&client_id=$ClientId&client_secret=$ClientSecret&resource=$Resource"

$Token = Invoke-RestMethod -Method Post -Uri $RequestAccessTokenUri -Body $body -ContentType 'application/x-www-form-urlencoded'

Write-Host "Print Token" -ForegroundColor Green
Write-Output $Token

After you have retrieved the access token, we will use that to authorize Azure REST methods.

Get Resource groups

To retrieve all resource groups in Azure. We will use the below URL.

GET https://management.azure.com/subscriptions/{subscriptionId}/resourcegroups?api-version=2017-05-10

Enter below code to Get-AzureResourceGroup.ps1.

# Get Azure Resource Groups
$ResourceGroupApiUri = "https://management.azure.com/subscriptions/$SubscriptionId/resourcegroups?api-version=2017-05-10"

$Headers = @{}

$Headers.Add("Authorization","$($Token.token_type) "+ " " + "$($Token.access_token)")

$ResourceGroups = Invoke-RestMethod -Method Get -Uri $ResourceGroupApiUri -Headers $Headers

Write-Host "Print Resource groups" -ForegroundColor Green
Write-Output $ResourceGroups

The above line of code should return all the resource groups from an Azure subscription.

Below is the full script and output.

# Variables
$TenantId = "" # Enter Tenant Id.
$ClientId = "" # Enter Client Id.
$ClientSecret = "" # Enter Client Secret.
$Resource = "https://management.core.windows.net/"
$SubscriptionId = "" # Enter Subscription Id.

$RequestAccessTokenUri = "https://login.microsoftonline.com/$TenantId/oauth2/token"

$body = "grant_type=client_credentials&client_id=$ClientId&client_secret=$ClientSecret&resource=$Resource"

$Token = Invoke-RestMethod -Method Post -Uri $RequestAccessTokenUri -Body $body -ContentType 'application/x-www-form-urlencoded'

Write-Host "Print Token" -ForegroundColor Green
Write-Output $Token

# Get Azure Resource Groups
$ResourceGroupApiUri = "https://management.azure.com/subscriptions/$SubscriptionId/resourcegroups?api-version=2017-05-10"

$Headers = @{}

$Headers.Add("Authorization","$($Token.token_type) "+ " " + "$($Token.access_token)")

$ResourceGroups = Invoke-RestMethod -Method Get -Uri $ResourceGroupApiUri -Headers $Headers

Write-Host "Print Resource groups" -ForegroundColor Green
Write-Output $ResourceGroups

Output:

The post Access Azure REST API using PowerShell appeared first on TEKSpace Blog.

NOTE: You will need to have a Azure subscription and Microsoft account to perform below actions.

Before we get started, we need to first login to portal.azure.com and register application in Azure Active Directory (Azure AD). Follow below steps to get started.

Register App with Azure AD

What do I mean when I say register app with Azure AD?

In order to access Azure API, or any API’s in Microsoft products, we need to create an App. The app could be called anything. For example, if you have an application that provisions IAAS VM’s in Azure, you can register an App in Azure AD that is called Azure IAAS VM provisioning. You can create as many apps in Azure AD. The app is like a service account to access Azure API. It can have RBAC permissions and can be restricted what it can access. Now that you know what app registration means, let’s go ahead and create an App.

App Registration

After you log in to Azure Portal, click on All services in the top left-hand side.

It will display another window next to the navigation panel. In all services filter, go ahead and type Azure and select Azure Active Directory.

After you click on Azure Active Directoroy, click on App registrations.

Now click on New application registration

In the Create window, fill in the below fields:

Name: {Name your application}
Application Type: {Select Web app / Api or Native}
Sign-on URL: {URL where you can sign in. This can be changed later.}

Now, you might be thinking what option to select in Application Type? This depends on whether your application that will access is a web app or some script that will access Azure API. If you like your users to log in to access Azure resources via the web, you can use Web app / API. For the purpose of this tutorial let’s select web app / api to register app.

After you have defined all the values, click on Create.

Once it has been successfully created, in the App registration window, change the second drop down from my apps to all apps.

Generating Client Secret

After you have successfully created an App. Let’s generate client secret that will be used later to call REST methods.

In New application registration window, after selecting all apps, click on Azure Resource Management. It will take you to new window. In there click on Settings that is on the top and then click on Keys.

In Passwords, fill in the required information. Select Expires in dropdown to define when your key will expire. For the purpose of this tutorial, I will select In 1 year. You can add any string values in Description & Value fields as long as it makes sense to you.

Click on Save.

Once you have saved the key, it will show you randomly generated key in Value field. Store it somewhere securely. We will use that secret key to authenticate later.

Subscription level access to App

In order for you to access resources in Azure subscription. You need to add a recently created app to your subscription. Follow the below steps to grant contributor access to the app.

Go to All Servers -> Subscriptions.

You will be navigated to the Subscription window where you will see all the subscriptions you are part of. If you have more than one subscription, select the subscription you want to grant access to. In my case, I only have one subscription. So I will select that subscription as shown below.

Click on Access Control IAM and then click on Add.

In the Add Permission window, select contributor for role. In the select input box, type the app name you created in Azure AD and select it. In my case, I created Azure Resource Management.

Once you have set the required fields. Click on Save at the bottom.

After you have given successful permission, click on Refresh in your subscription window and you will see your app showing in the list. See below example.

Accessing Azure Resources with Postman

After you have successfully registered an App in Azure AD and given appropriate permissions, let’s go ahead and request access token to access Azure resources.

Request Access Token

To request access token, we need to make a post request at this URL:

POST https://login.microsoftonline.com/{tenant_id}/oauth2/token

You can get the tenant id from Azure Active Directory -> Property -> Directory ID.

Below are the required parameters that needs to be sent in post request.

To learn more about the above requirements. Visit the link here.

Using postman to request access token.

In Postman, change the dropdown to POST and next to it enter URL to make the POST request to. Make sure you enter tenant id. Without tenant id request will not work.

In body tab, select x-www-form-urlencoded and enter required fields grant_type, client_id, ‘client_secret’, and resource.

After you have filled in the required information, click on the send button, and you should see a response as shown below.

Now we will use the access token to get resource groups by using below URL.

GET https://management.azure.com/subscriptions/{subscriptionId}/resourcegroups?api-version=2017-05-10

Replace {subscriptionId} with your subscription id. You can get that information from All Services -> Subscriptions.

In postman, enter above URL and change the subscriptionId to your subscription ID. Then go to Headers and in Key field enter Authorization and in Value field enter Bearer {YOUR_ACCESS_TOKEN} and click send. You should receive a response with all the resource groups available in your subscription.

Links used to create this tutorial are as followed:

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/active-directory/develop/active-directory-protocols-oauth-service-to-service#service-to-service-access-token-request

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/rest/api/#authorization-code-grant-interactive-clients

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/rest/api/resources/resourcegroups/list

The post Accessing Azure REST API appeared first on TEKSpace Blog.

In this tutorial, I will show you how to convert a certificate from .pfx to base64.

Open PowerShell as an administrator.

Now that we have a PowerShell console opened. Let’s first load the content into a variable.

$pfx_cert = get-content 'c:\certificate.pfx' -Encoding Byte

The above command will load the content with byte encoding. If you print $pfx_cert in the PowerShell console, you will see random numbers. In order to convert to base64 format, we will use system namespace from Windows system.

To convert a certificate in base64, execute the below command.

$base64 = [System.Convert]::ToBase64String($pfx_cert)

The above command will save it in $base64 variable, and now you can use this variable or output it to a file depending on your scenario.

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