A searchable template index is maintained at https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/templates/

This is a repo that contains all the currently available Azure Resource Manager templates contributed by the community. These templates are indexed on Azure.com and available to view here https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/templates/

We're following basic GitHub Flow. If you have ever contributed to an open source project on GitHub, you probably know it already - if you have no idea what we're talking about, check out GitHub's official guide. Here's a quick summary:

• Fork the repository and clone to your local machine
• You should already be on the default branch master - if not, check it out (git checkout master)
• Create a new branch for your template git checkout -b my-new-template)
• Write your template
• Stage the changed files for a commit (git add .)
• Commit your files with a useful commit message (example) (git commit)
• Push your new branch to your GitHub Fork (git push origin my-new-template)
• Visit this repository in GitHub and create a Pull Request.

For a detailed tutorial, please check out our tutorial!

To make sure your template is added to Azure.com index, please follow these guidelines. Any templates that are out of compliance will be added to the blacklist and not be indexed on Azure.com

1. Every template must be contained in its own folder. Name this folder something that describes what your template does. Usually this naming pattern looks like appName-osName or level-platformCapability (e.g. 101-vm-user-image)

• Protip - Try to keep the name of your template folder short so that it fits inside the Github folder name column width.

2. The template file must be named azuredeploy.json
3. There should be be a parameters file name azuredeploy.parameters.json.

• Please fill out the values for the parameters according to rules defined in the template (allowed values etc.), For parameters without rules, a simple "changeme" will do as the acomghbot only checks for sytactic correctness using the ARM Validate Template API

4. The template folder must host the scripts that are needed for successful template execution
5. The template folder must contain a metadata.json file to allow the template to be indexed on Azure.com

• Guidelines on the metadata file below

6. Include a README.md file that explains how the template works. No need to include the parameters that the template needs. We can render them on Azure.com from the template. Include code for buttons to "Deploy to Azure" and "Visualize" as seen in the README.md files for other templates. If you see problems with visualizing your template, please report the issue in the ArmViz GitHub project here.
7. Template parameters should follow camelCasing
8. Try to reduce the number of parameters a user has to enter to deploy your template. Make things that do not need to be globally unique such as VNETs, NICs, PublicIPs, Subnets, NSGs as variables.

• If you must include a parameter, please include a default value as well. See the next rule for naming convention for the default values.

9. Name variables using this scheme templateScenarioResourceName (e.g. simpleLinuxVMVNET, userRoutesNSG, elasticsearchPublicIP etc.) that describe the scenario rather. This ensures when a user browses all the resources in the Portal there aren't a bunch of resources with the same name (e.g. myVNET, myPublicIP, myNSG)

10. Storage account names need to be lower case and can't contain hyphens (-) in addition to other domain name restrictions. These also need to be globally unique.

11. Passwords must be passed into parameters of type securestring.

    • Passwords must also be passed to customScriptExtension using the commandToExecute property in protectedSettings. This will look like below

     "properties": {
       "publisher": "Microsoft.OSTCExtensions",
       "type": "CustomScriptForLinux",
       "typeHandlerVersion": "1.4",
       "settings": {
       "fileUris": [
     	   "https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Azure/azure-quickstart-templates/master/lamp-app/install_lamp.sh"
       ]
     },
     "protectedSettings": {
       "commandToExecute": "[concat('sh install_lamp.sh ', parameters('mySqlPassword'))]"
       }
     }
    

12. Every parameter in the template must have the lower-case description tag specified using the metadata property. This looks like below

"newStorageAccountName": {
      "type": "string",
      "metadata": {
          "description": "The name of the new storage account created to store the VMs disks"
      }
}

See the starter template here for more information on passing validation

• It is a good practice to pass your template through a JSON linter to remove extraneous commas, parenthesis, brackets that may break the "Deploy to Azure" experience. Try https://jsonlint.com/ or a linter package for your favorite editing environment (Visual Studio Code, Atom, Sublime Text, Visual Studio etc.)
• It's also a good idea to format your JSON for better readability. You can use a JSON formatter package for your local editor or format online using this link.

Here are the required parameters for a valid metadata.json file

To be more consistent with the Visual Studio and Gallery experience we're updating the metadata.json file structure. The new structure looks like below

{
  "itemDisplayName": "",
  "description": "",
  "summary": "",
  "githubUsername": "",
  "dateUpdated": "<e.g. 2015-12-20>"
}

The metadata.json file will be validated using these rules

itemDisplayName

• Cannot be more than 60 characters

description

• Cannot be more than 1000 characters
• Cannot contain HTML
• This is used for the template description on the Azure.com index template details page

summary

• Cannot be more than 200 characters
• This is shown for template description on the main Azure.com template index page

githubUsername

• This is the username of the original template author. Please do not change this.
• This is used to display template author and Github profile pic in the Azure.com index

dateUpdated

• Must be in yyyy-mm-dd format.
• The date must not be in the future to the date of the pull request

A starter template is provided here for you to follow

acomghbot is a bot designed to enforce the above rules and check the syntactic correctness of the template using the ARM Validate Template API. Below are some of the more cryptic error messages you might receive from the bot and how to solve these issues.

• This error is received when the parameters file contains a parameter that is not defined in the template.

  The file azuredeploy.json is not valid. Response from ARM API: BadRequest - {"error":{"code":"InvalidTemplate","message":"Deployment template validation failed: 'The template parameters 'vmDnsName' are not valid; they are not present in the original template and can therefore not be provided at deployment time. The only supported parameters for this template are 'newStorageAccountName, adminUsername, adminPassword, dnsNameForPublicIP, windowsOSVersion, sizeOfDiskInGB'.'."}}
  

• This error is received when a parameter in the parameter file has an empty value.

  The file azuredeploy.json is not valid. Response from ARM API: BadRequest - {"error":{"code":"InvalidTemplate","message":"Deployment template validation failed: 'The template resource '' at line '66' and column '6' is not valid. The name property cannot be null or empty'."}}
  

• This error message is received when a value entered in the parameters file is different from the allowed values defined for the parameter in the tempalte file.

  The file azuredeploy.json is not valid. Response from ARM API: BadRequest - {"error":{"code":"InvalidTemplate","message":"Deployment template validation failed: 'The provided value for the template parameter 'publicIPAddressType' at line '40' and column '29' is not valid.'."}}
  

We are in the process of activating automated template validation through Travis CI. These builds can be accessed by clicking the 'Details' link at the bottom of the pull-request dialog. This process will ensure that your template conforms to all the rules mentioned above and will also deploy your template to our test azure subscription.

To ensure your template passes, special placeholder values are required when deploying a template, depending what the parameter is used for:

• GEN-UNIQUE - use this placeholder for new storage account names, domain names for public ips and other fields that need a unique name. The value will always be alpha numeric value with a length of 18 characters.
• GEN-UNIQUE-[N] - use this placeholder for new storage account names, domain names for public ips and other fields that need a unique name. The value will always be alpha numeric value with a length of [N], where [N] can be any number from 3 to 32 inclusive.
• GEN-SSH-PUB-KEY - use this placeholder if you need an SSH public key
• GEN-PASSWORD - use this placeholder if you need an azure-compatible password for a VM

Here's an example in an azuredeploy.parameters.json file:

{
  "$schema": "https://schema.management.azure.com/schemas/2015-01-01/deploymentParameters.json#",
  "contentVersion": "1.0.0.0",
  "parameters": {
    "newStorageAccountName":{
      "value": "GEN-UNIQUE"
    },
    "location": {
      "value": "West US"
    },
    "adminUsername": {
      "value": "sedouard"
    },
    "sshKeyData": {
      "value": "GEN-SSH-PUB-KEY"
    },
    "dnsNameForPublicIP": {
      "value": "GEN-UNIQUE-13"
    }
  }
}

If you're making use of raw.githubusercontent.com links within your template contribution (within the template file itself or any scripts in your contribution) please ensure the following:

• Ensure any raw.githubusercontent.com links which refer to content within your pull request points to `https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Azure/azure-quickstart-templates/master/...' and NOT your fork.

• All raw.githubusercontent.com links are placed in your azuredeploy.json and you pass the link down into your scripts & linked templates via this top-level template. This ensures we re-link correctly from your pull-request repository and branch.

Please Note: that although pull requests with links pointing to https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Azure/azure-quickstart-templates/master/...' may not exist in the Azure repo at the time of your pull-request, at CI run-time, those links will be converted to https://raw.githubusercontent.com/{your_user_name}/azure-quickstart-templates/{your_branch}/...'. Be sure to check the casing of `https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Azure/azure-quickstart-templates/master/...' as this is case-sensitive.

If your template has some pre-requisite such as an Azure Active Directory application or service principal, we don't support this yet. To bypass the CI workflow include a file called .ci_skip in the root of your template folder.

If your deployment fails, check the details link of the Travis CI build, which will take you to the CI log. If the template deployment was attempted, you will get two top-level fields. The first is parameters which is the rendered version of your azuredeploy.parameters.json. This will include any replacements for GEN- parameters. The second is template which is the contents of your azuredeploy.json, after any raw.githubusercontent.com relinking. These values are the exact values you need to reproduce the error. Keep in mind, that depending on the resources allocated, it can take a few minutes for the CI system to cleanup provisioned resources.

Here is an example failure log:

Server Error:{
    "error": "Deployment provisioning state was not successful\n",
    "_rgName": "qstci-26dd2ec4-bae9-12fb-fd46-fd4ce455a035",
    "command": "azure group deployment create --resource-group (your_group_name) --template-file azuredeploy.json --parameters-file azuredeploy.parameters.json",
    "parameters": {
        "$schema": "https://schema.management.azure.com/schemas/2015-01-01/deploymentParameters.json#",
        "contentVersion": "1.0.0.0",
        "parameters": {
            "clusterName": {
                "value": "ci4391bcd700f86e84"
            },
            "clusterType": {
                "value": "hadoop"
            },
            "clusterStorageAccountName": {
                "value": "cifb07cf059735afba"
            },
            "clusterLoginUserName": {
                "value": "admin"
            },
            "clusterLoginPassword": {
                "value": "ciP$ss2e6a28784055eda8"
            }
        }
    },
    "template": {
        "$schema": "https://schema.management.azure.com/schemas/2015-01-01/deploymentTemplate.json#",
        "contentVersion": "1.0.0.0",
        "parameters": {
            "clusterType": {
                "type": "string",
                "allowedValues": [
                    "hadoop",
                    "hbase",
                    "storm",
                    "spark"
                ],
                "metadata": {
                    "description": "The type of the HDInsight cluster to create."
                }
            }
            // more parameters here...
        },
        "variables": {
            "defaultApiVersion": "2015-06-15",
            "clusterApiVersion": "2015-03-01-preview",
            "adlsApiVersion": "2015-10-01-preview"
        },
        "resources": [
            {
                "name": "[parameters('adlStoreName')]",
                "type": "Microsoft.DataLakeStore/accounts",
                "location": "East US 2",
                "apiVersion": "[variables('adlsApiVersion')]",
                "dependsOn": [],
                "tags": {},
                "properties": {
                    "initialUser": "[parameters('servicePrincipalObjectId')]"
                }
            },
            // more resources here...
        ],
        "outputs": {
            "adlStoreAccount": {
                "type": "object",
                "value": "[reference(resourceId('Microsoft.DataLakeStore/accounts',parameters('adlStoreName')))]"
            }
            // more outputs here...
        }
    }
}