As part of my MRes I am using Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform. I was pleasantly surprised to see that Microsoft provide Linux support for Azure and SDK’s for a lot of programming languages. However I hit a few bumps getting the command line tools installed due to some quirks with Ubuntu.

The easiest way to get the Azure CLI is to use the Node.js package manager npm:

$ sudo apt-get install nodejs
$ sudo apt-get install npm

This should all work fine and then you can simply install the Azure CLI using the command below:

$ npm install azure-cli -g

Now on other Linux distros this may work fine. However on Ubuntu 14.04 there was an issue due to the fact that Azure CLI calls Node.js using the node command and on Ubuntu it is called nodejs. As a result you get the error below when you call azure:

/usr/bin/env: node: No such file or directory

To fix this, use the command below to tell Ubuntu that when any program calls node it really means nodejs:

$ sudo update-alternatives --install /usr/bin/node nodejs /usr/bin/nodejs 100

You should now be able to call azure and all its functions!