Recently, my workmate Vic wrote some great posts regarding to Azure Linked Templates. This is, a supplementary post to his ones, to show how to share parameters across the linked templates.

Scripts and templates used in this post can be found at: https://github.com/devkimchi/Linked-ARM-Templates-Sample

parametersLink and parameters Properties

We have a master template, master-deployment.json, and it looks like:

Each nested template has a parameter called environment that has the same value as the one in the master template. Each template also has a corresponding parameter file. Therefore, as above, we use both parametersLink and parameters properties to handle both. However, life is not easy.

Oooops! We can’t use both parametersLink and parameters at the same time. We have to use one or the other. This is by design at the time of this writing. Because the environment parameter is a common denominator across all the nested templates, it is natural to think that the parameter can be passed from master to nested ones.

How can we work this out then? There are several workarounds.

  1. Add the common parameters to each parameter JSON file and upload it to Azure Storage Account programatically.
  2. Create a set of parameter files for all possible combinations.
  3. Use something to refer during the template deployment, whose value will be changing over time during the deployment but the reference point remains the same.

Update Parameters Programatically

The easiest way is the first option. It can be simply achieved by running a separate PowerShell script before the deployment. Let’s have a look.

This is merely to upload nested template files to Azure Storage Account. It excludes parameter files because they need to be updated before being uploaded. Let’s have a look at the following PowerShell script.

The core part of the script is:

  • To read parameter file as a JSON object,
  • To add the environment property to the JSON object, and
  • To overwrite the parameter file.

Then this updated parameter files are uploaded to Azure Storage Account. Now our Storage Account has got all nested templates and their parameter files. Let’s run the master template again without the parameters property.

Tada~! It all works fine!

So far, we’ve taken a look how to sort out the restriction that we can’t use both parametersLink and parameters properties at the same time. We obviously need a help of another script to run linked templates with their parameters by updating it. It’s definitely not an ideal scenario but certainly it works. If this update is done by hand, it’s tedious, which should be avoided. However, in CI/CD pipelines, it wouldn’t be an issue because we can automate it.

Category:
Azure Platform
Tags:
, ,

Join the conversation! 4 Comments

  1. hey mate, did you have issues with your last convertto-json?

    I’m having issues with encoding, where single-quotes are getting converted to “\u0027” in the template…not ideal. Cheers.

Comments are closed.