How to fix Please run az login to setup account in Terraform

Run the az login command to authenticate:

az login

This will open a browser window where you can sign in with your Azure credentials. After successful authentication, return to your terminal.

Check that you are authenticated and can see your subscription:

az account show

This should display your current Azure subscription details including the subscription ID and tenant.

Now that you are authenticated with Azure CLI, Terraform can use those credentials:

terraform plan
terraform apply

Terraform will use your Azure CLI authentication tokens automatically.

In automated environments, do not rely on az login. Instead, use Service Principal authentication by setting environment variables:

export ARM_CLIENT_ID="your-client-id"
export ARM_CLIENT_SECRET="your-client-secret"
export ARM_SUBSCRIPTION_ID="your-subscription-id"
export ARM_TENANT_ID="your-tenant-id"

Terraform will automatically use these variables for authentication. Do not use az login --service-principal as Terraform does not support Service Principal authentication through the Azure CLI.

If you want to force Terraform to use only environment variables and not attempt CLI authentication, add this to your provider block:

provider "azurerm" {
  features {}
  use_cli = false
}

Or set the environment variable:

export ARM_USE_CLI=false

In Azure DevOps pipelines, use the AzureCLI@2 task to handle authentication:

- task: AzureCLI@2
  inputs:
    azureSubscription: 'your-service-connection'
    scriptType: 'bash'
    scriptLocation: 'inlineScript'
    inlineScript: |
      terraform plan
      terraform apply

The AzureCLI@2 task automatically sets up the authentication context for Terraform.