Feature request： Silent Login for Automation Scenarios

[Alex-AZPS]

Related command

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.

When running automation scripts on a development machine, the az login command always triggers an account picker prompt, requiring manual account selection.

In most cases, there is only one account configured on the device, making this prompt unnecessary and interrupting automation workflows.

We would like to have a silent login option that automatically signs in when only one account is available, and only shows the account picker when necessary (e.g., multiple accounts or login issues).

Possible approaches:

Describe the solution you'd like

az login default-account # silent login using the default account
az login select-account # explicitly show the account picker

Goal:
Allow az login to work non-interactively for automation and CI/CD scenarios, improving efficiency and usability.

Describe alternatives you've considered

Additional context

[yonzhan]

Thank you for opening this issue, we will look into it.

[github-actions]

Here are some similar issues that might help you. Please check if they can solve your problem.

• New option to allow non interactive "az login" #30054
• Add more non-interactive authentication modes #7594

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Possible solution (Extracted from existing issue, might be incorrect; please verify carefully)

Solution 1:

You may set the core.login_experience_v2 configuration option to off to disable this feature.

az config set core.login_experience_v2=off

See https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/cli/azure/authenticate-azure-cli-interactively#subscription-selector

Reference:

• New option to allow non interactive "az login" #30054 (comment)

Solution 2:

There is a feature request to support --subscription in az login. If it is implemented, it can be used to disable the interactive subscription selector as well.

Reference:

• New option to allow non interactive "az login" #30054 (comment)

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[jiasli]

We currently pass prompt='select_account' to MSAL's acquire_token_interactive so that the account picker is always shown:

azure-cli/src/azure-cli-core/azure/cli/core/auth/identity.py

Line 167 in ad0bacc

scopes, prompt='select_account', port=8400 if self._is_adfs else None,

Always showing the account picker guarantees that the user is logging in using the desired account.

prompt='none' can be used to bypass the account picker:

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/entra/identity-platform/v2-oauth2-auth-code-flow#request-an-authorization-code

prompt=none is the opposite. It ensures that the user isn't presented with any interactive prompt. If the request can't be completed silently by using single-sign on, the Microsoft identity platform returns an interaction_required error.

However, I don't think there is an option to

• automatically signs in when only one account is available
• only shows the account picker when necessary (e.g., multiple accounts or login issues)

If there is no available account, Azure CLI can implement a none -> select_account retry logic, but there is no way to let MSAL conditionally launch the account picker for multiple accounts.

In fact, user account is not meant for automation scenarios. Automation scenarios should leverage service principal or managed identity.

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az login default-account # silent login using the default account
az login select-account # explicitly show the account picker

az login is a command, not a command group. default-account and select-account will be positional parameters, which violates the design guide of Azure CLI.

[Alex-AZPS]

customer feedback: I'm doing a script for me and my peer members, we don't want run a job in cloud.

So, managed identity is useful when I run a job in cloud, but if I run something on end user machine as part of custom build action, or manually as part of big script that runs for hours, it is not something that is usefull.
-- I want to record this requirement and see if any improvements are needed or if other customers also have this ask.