What's a difference between Azure PowerShell commandlets and Command-Line Tools?

Question

What are the differences between Azure PowerShell Commandlets and Command-Line Tools?

is there a difference in capabilities?
are new versions published at around the same time?
is one of them the 'preferred' way to manage Azure resources?

I am interested in managing web sites, VMs and cloud services from developer's machine and also from Ci server (TeamCity/MSBuild - starting / stopping VMs).

I've noticed that Command-Line Tools is just a small ~5MB download while PowerShell commandlets have several dependencies (~22MB) and June 2013 version still relies on Azure SDK 1.8 October 2012.

mcollier · Accepted Answer · 2013-07-11 18:46:57Z

9

The PowerShell cmdlets work only in PowerShell (on Windows machines). They're great for automating several concurrent tasks (i.e. scripting out an entire environment), or carrying out single tasks.

The command-line tools are cross platform tools (work on Windows, Linux, etc.) These are written in node.js. They're not as good for scripting multiple actions, but are great for developers that prefer the command line to execute tasks (instead of going to the Azure management portal).

As far as I can tell, they are not on a synced release schedule. You can follow the progress of each via their github.com repositories (https://github.com/WindowsAzure/azure-sdk-tools-xplat and https://github.com/WindowsAzure/azure-sdk-tools).

answered Jul 11, 2013 at 18:46

mcollier

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Michael · Accepted Answer · 2016-09-15 15:41:16Z

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It appears that Powershell is a wrapper for the node tools. If you get an error in PS it will reference a .js file.

To test this simply allow your authentication token to expire without a login. The error message in the .json file it sends you to indicates a failure in a Javascript file.

answered Sep 15, 2016 at 15:41

Michael

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Mark Cowlishaw - MSFT · Accepted Answer · 2013-11-08 23:40:25Z

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The release schedule for WIndows Azure PowerShell and the command line tools are both approximately once every 3 weeks. You can get the latest from the github repo at any time (as shown above).

answered Nov 8, 2013 at 23:40

Mark Cowlishaw - MSFT

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