It’s an improvement on writing Azure Resource Manager (ARM) templates directly by better supporting features such as type safety and code modularity and reuse.

That said, Bicep still has a very close relationship with ARM templates. In fact, it’s an abstraction over ARM templates with templates written using Bicep able to be transpiled back to ARM templates. And if you have a bunch of existing ARM templates, they can be transpiled and converted into Bicep files.

Let’s now take a look at how you can get started using Bicep.

Preparing your environment

There’s a few things you’ll want to install in order to start using Bicep.

First you’ll want to download Visual Studio Code (free) and install the Bicep extension (also free). This will give you an editor in which to write your Bicep files, and the extension adds handy features such as Intellisense code suggestions and template validation to ensure the correct syntax.

You’ll also need to install the Bicep command line interface (CLI). The easiest, cross-platform way to do this is by installing the Azure command line interface. But if you’re after an alternative, see this list.

Become a Bicep guru

Dive deeper into Bicep with our getting started with Bicep course on Udemy today!

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Writing your first Bicep file

Open Visual Studio Code, and create a new file called HelloWorld.bicep. In it, paste the following code:

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resource appConfig 'Microsoft.AppConfiguration/configurationStores@2020-06-01' = {
  name: 'bicepDemoAppConfig'
  location: 'westus2'
  sku: {
    name: 'standard'
  }
}

In this template, we’re creating an App Configuration service in Azure. Lets breakdown the template:

appConfig provides a local resource name for use within the template if you need to refer to this resource as a dependency, or from within another resource.

Microsoft.AppConfiguration/configurationStores@2020-06-01 refers to the resource type and the values that can be configured. See this Microsoft documentation for a full list of resource types.

As such, name, location and sku are all values that can be set for the resource type.

Next steps

To learn how to deploy this template, or to find out about more advanced Bicep topics including for loops, conditional statements and modularised templates check out our Udemy course on getting started with Bicep.