Azure-sdk-for-python: Getting IP address of virtual machines

[alexvicegrab]

I'm trying to get a list of virtual machines and their IP addresses (so as to be able to SSH to them, etc.), as per:

azure_subscription = os.environ['AZURE_SUBSCRIPTION']
azure_email = os.environ['AZURE_EMAIL']
azure_password = os.environ['AZURE_PASSWORD']

# Connect to account
credentials = UserPassCredentials(
    azure_email,  # Your user
    azure_password,  # Your password
)
compute_client = ComputeManagementClient(
    credentials,
    azure_subscription,
)

# List istances
instance_list = compute_client.virtual_machines.list_all()
for i, instance in enumerate(instance_list):
    print ('{}) {} - {}').format(i, t.red(instance.name), instance.hardware_profile.vm_size)

However, on inspecting the virtual_machine objects found, I can't find a public_ip property in the fields or sub-fields.

How can I extract the public IP of each of the machines?

[alexvicegrab]

Ended up doing something like this:

network_client = NetworkManagementClient(
    credentials,
    azure_subscription,
)

# Unfortunate and convoluted way of obtaining public IP of selected instance
ni_reference = instance.network_profile.network_interfaces[0]
ni_reference = ni_reference.id.split('/')
ni_group = ni_reference[4]
ni_name = ni_reference[8]

net_interface = network_client.network_interfaces.get(ni_group, ni_name)
ip_reference = net_interface.ip_configurations[0].public_ip_address
ip_reference = ip_reference.id.split('/')
ip_group = ip_reference[4]
ip_name = ip_reference[8]

public_ip = network_client.public_ip_addresses.get(ip_group, ip_name)
public_ip = public_ip.ip_address

Surely, there must be a much simpler way of getting the IP address than this, but what is it?

[lmazuel]

Hi @alexvicegrab

Unfortunately, you're right, this is the only way to get the actual PublicIP, since the VM is hosted by the Compute provider and the IPs by the Network provider. This is a limitation of the RestAPI:

• Get a VM to get NIC
• Get Public IP id from the NIC
• Get the PublicIP value from the PublicIP id

Since this is an auto-generated SDK, this is difficult to generate less than 3 Python calls from 3 RestAPI calls. However, I agree that this might be interesting to provide:

• An ID parser, so you avoid the split part (useful for all packages, in azure-common)
• A PublicIP / NIC getter as a tool provided in the azure-mgmt-compute package

[akx]

An ID parser, so you avoid the split part (useful for all packages, in azure-common)

This actually exists these days as msrestazure.tools.parse_resource_id: https://github.com/Azure/msrestazure-for-python/blob/594ee8a8412b176b62747aa0f89132242483ae5d/msrestazure/tools.py#L104

[lmazuel]

Thanks @akx ! Indeed, since I wrote this we added the ID parse to msrestazure :)

[alexvicegrab]

Update: Nowadays, if provisioning a VM, I would use Terraform instead, rather than the python API. This will allow me to get the Public IP via one of the attached resources on the Terraform output.tf.

Closing this.