When you’re working with the Azure CLI, locations are one of the most commonly used parts of commands you have to write. Some of them are really easy to remember, like eastus. But others may be a little bit harder to get right the first time, like australiacentral2.
One of the really great things about the Azure CLI is that you can dynamically figure out the location name for the region that you’re looking for.
When you run az account list-locations you should get similar output (parts omitted for brevity):
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
DisplayName Name RegionalDisplayName
------------------------ ------------------- -------------------------------------
East US eastus (US) East US
East US 2 eastus2 (US) East US 2
South Central US southcentralus (US) South Central US
West US 2 westus2 (US) West US 2
Australia East australiaeast (Asia Pacific) Australia East
Southeast Asia southeastasia (Asia Pacific) Southeast Asia
North Europe northeurope (Europe) North Europe
UK South uksouth (Europe) UK South
West Europe westeurope (Europe) West Europe
Central US centralus (US) Central US
Norway West norwaywest (Europe) Norway West
....
Switzerland West switzerlandwest (Europe) Switzerland West
UK West ukwest (Europe) UK West
UAE Central uaecentral (Middle East) UAE Central
Brazil Southeast brazilsoutheast (South America) Brazil Southeast
Pipe that to grep and you can find out the Name of the location you want to use:
1
2
3
4
5
6
$ az account list-locations -o table | grep australia
Australia East australiaeast (Asia Pacific) Australia East
Australia australia Australia
Australia Central australiacentral (Asia Pacific) Australia Central
Australia Central 2 australiacentral2 (Asia Pacific) Australia Central 2
Australia Southeast australiasoutheast (Asia Pacific) Australia Southeast
No more guessing the location name! And there are times when you may want to find out the paired region for a particular location:
1
2
$ az account list-locations --query "[?name=='australiaeast'].{pairedRegion:metadata.pairedRegion[0].name}" -o tsv
australiasoutheast
Now I know that australiaeast and australiasoutheast are paired regions.
Hopefully this blog post has shown a quick way to find out location names right from the command line!