I would like to recreate my azure portal vm configuration to create the same thing with az cli. Is there a way to do that?

thanks. I was unaware that the cli and portal did not have feature parity

to address the title of the question, do you know how I can copy the configuration of a VM that I created through the portal so that I can use it on the cli (assuming that the cli supports all that I request)?

Hello Cloud D,

Use the “Export Template” Feature (Recommended)

Go to your VM in the Azure Portal.

On the left blade, scroll down and click on "Automation" → "Export template".

This provides you with an ARM (Azure Resource Manager) template that fully defines the VM configuration.

Click "Download" or copy the JSON content.

👉 To convert that into CLI:

You can extract values like:

VM size

Image reference (Publisher, Offer, SKU)

Admin username

OS disk settings

NIC & VNet settings

Then, use the equivalent az vm create CLI command.

Example:

bash
CopyEdit
az vm create \
  --resource-group myResourceGroup \
  --name myVM \
  --image Canonical:UbuntuServer:18.04-LTS:latest \
  --size Standard_D2s_v3 \
  --vnet-name myVNet \
  --subnet mySubnet \
  --admin-username azureuser \
  --

Export Template Feature

1. Go to your VM in the Azure Portal.
2. On the left blade, scroll down and click on "Automation" → "Export template".
3. This provides an ARM (Azure Resource Manager) template that fully defines the VM configuration.
4. Click "Download" or copy the JSON content.

To convert that into CLI:

You can extract values like:

1. VM size
2. Image reference (Publisher, Offer, SKU)
3. Admin username
4. OS disk settings
5. NIC & VNet settings

Then, use the equivalent az vm create CLI command.

az vm create \
  --resource-group myResourceGroup \
  --name myVM \
  --image Canonical:UbuntuServer:24.04-LTS:cvm \
  --size Standard_D2s_v3 \
  --vnet-name myVNet \
  --subnet mySubnet \
  --admin-username azureuser \
  --generate-ssh-keys

We can also use the Azure CLI to extract with the command below,

az vm show \
  --resource-group myResourceGroup \
  --name myVM \
  --query "{Name:name, Size:hardwareProfile.vmSize, Image:storageProfile.imageReference, OsDisk:storageProfile.osDisk}" \
  --output json

Please Upvote and accept the thread as an answer if it helps!!

This is a manual process, right? For example, I have to translate

"hardwareProfile": {
    "vmSize": "Standard_DC2ads_v5"
},

to

--size Standard_D2s_v3

Correct? There is any way to take that ARM template and automatically know to translate it to the cli format, like vmSize to size and Standard_DC2ads_v5 to Standard_D2s_v3 ?