Kristen Womack presents an in-depth overview of the Azure Developer CLI (azd) July 2025 release, highlighting major new features, key improvements, bug fixes, updated documentation, and community-driven templates for Azure developers.

Azure Developer CLI (azd) July 2025 Release

Author: Kristen Womack

The July 2025 release of the Azure Developer CLI (azd) brings a range of new features, reliability improvements, security enhancements, and community-driven updates focused on enhancing the developer experience.

Release Overview

Versions released: 1.17.1, 1.18.0
Main themes: Developer experience, project validation, AI integration, authentication enhancements, security, and documentation expansion.

Join the release discussion on GitHub

New Features

Enhanced Project Validation

Improved project name validation prevents packaging failures caused by invalid characters, reducing deployment errors for developers. (PR #5380)

Generic OIDC Authentication Support

Expanded authentication to include generic OIDC with any CI provider, enabling broader integration with various pipelines beyond default providers. (PR #5397)

Improved User Experience

New confirmation prompt before setting a new environment as default avoids accidental environment switches. (PR #4832)

Enhanced Metadata Support

Boolean and integer default values now supported in azd metadata fields, increasing configuration flexibility. (PR #5384)

Metadata Field Regression Fix

Fixed an issue where prompting for boolean or integer fields without defaults was not handled correctly. (PR #5386)

Deployment Packaging Improvements

Support for .webappignore and .funcignore files allows selective exclusion of files from deployment packages, optimizing deployment performance. (PR #5383)

Interactive Hooks Enhancement

azd hooks run now always runs in interactive mode with improved schema validation for easier debugging and development. (PR #5430)

Static Web Apps CLI Update

Ensures the latest static-web-apps CLI npm package is always used for current deployment features. (PR #5203)

Terraform OIDC Support

Adds support for Terraform with OIDC authentication in pipeline configurations, improving secure infrastructure automation. (PR #5270)

Streamlined Project Initialization

Combines “Create a minimal project” with “Scan current directory” and introduces a --minimal flag for faster project creation. (PR #5280)

Enhanced Environment Management

azd env set accepts multiple key-value pairs for more efficient environment variable configuration. (PR #4942)

Compose CI/CD Improvements

Can conditionally set user-only role assignments in compose scenarios, controlled by a new AZURE_PRINCIPAL_TYPE environment variable. (PR #5285)

Subscription Management Enhancement

Subscriptions are now sorted in a case-insensitive manner for easier navigation. (PR #4969)

Bug Fixes

Error Handling Improvements

Bicep secure output parameter handling crash fixed (PR #5478).
Fixed PowerShell 7 suggestion text for service-level hooks (PR #5468).
Preflight error handling improved for deployment stack validation (PR #5470).

Environment and Authentication Fixes

Proper injection of environment variables for Bicep parameter evaluation (PR #5446).
Fixed nil pointer error for Azure DevOps authentication credential checks (PR #5459).

.NET Aspire Improvements

Improved error handling of unrecognized expressions in manifest files (PR #5434).

Other Changes

Development Workflow

CI workflow optimizations: obsolete runs cancelled when new commits are pushed (PR #5471).
Improved documentation for azd provision --no-state (PR #5420).
Fixed null tag handling in deployment stack operations (PR #5372).

Infrastructure and Tooling

Added Microsoft.Automation/automationAccounts to output resources (PR #5378).
Updated GitHub CLI to v2.75.1 (PR #5461).
Updated Bicep CLI to v0.36.177 (PR #5443).

New Documentation

Several new articles have been published on Microsoft Learn:

Azure Container Apps deployment strategies: Blue/green deployments, rolling updates, and advanced patterns for Azure Container Apps.
Remote build support: Use remote builds with Azure Container Registry for consistent, high-performance builds.
Docker as a language in azd: Use Docker for containerized applications, especially when native language support is lacking.
azd Extension Framework: Extend azd with custom workflows and third-party integrations.
Dev to Production workflow with azd: Guidance for end-to-end, one-command deployments.

New Templates

Community Highlight:

New Azure Functions quickstart template (by Paul Yuknewicz): Demonstrates event-driven integration with Azure SQL Database using SQL Triggers and Bindings in .NET.
Suitable for data integration, audit trails, and real-time analytics scenarios.
The template gallery now surpasses 248 templates, prompting addition of pagination support to manage the growing resource.

Getting Started with azd

Works on Windows, Linux, macOS via your preferred terminal.
Use directly in Visual Studio Code or GitHub Codespaces with the azd extension.
Preview feature available in Visual Studio.

Resources:

Community contributors are highlighted and thanked for their ongoing input to this rapidly evolving tool.

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