Installing the Azure CLI on Manjaro (Arch) with Anaconda

I recently got access to Azure at work a few weeks back, and was trying to connect to it from my Linux workstation. As a compromise to get NVidia drivers working for my GTX960 GPU, I have Manjaro installed on it. I wasn't expecting a really seamless installation process — despite the "MS♥Linux" propaganda, that boat is going to take years to turn. Case in point out of the many we've encountered: there are no free or shared tiers for Web App Service instances for Linux.

Both awscli and gcp are both pip-installable, but for some reason azure CLI needs to install other dependencies. However as my home setup is a little ways off the beaten path (Manjaro, with Anaconda installed) I did hit a snag worthy of sharing.

I started with:

yaourt -S python-azure-cli --noconfirm

N.B. that last argument is highly recomended. The azure CLI is not a single install, but rather like 100 different modules, and you will have to accept/ continue every single one of them.

but I got the error:

rm: cannot remove '/tmp/yaourt-tmp-leblancfg/aur-python-azure-storage/pkg/python-azure-storage/usr/lib/python3.?/site-packages/azure/__init__.py': No such file or directory
==> ERROR: A failure occurred in package().
    Aborting...
==> ERROR: Makepkg was unable to build python-azure-storage.

If you don't get this error and the previous incantation works for you straight away, great! I've since notified the package manager, and hopefully this gets resolved in later versions of the package.

Fortunately, Microsoft also packages a distribution-independent installation script, which you can run with:

curl -L https://aka.ms/InstallAzureCli | bash

I thought it was in the bag but got the error:

ERROR: This script does not support the Python Anaconda environment. Create an Anaconda virtual environment and install with 'pip'

Well darn. I want to be able to call az through the whole system, not just in a virtual env. If you get this and have Anaconda installed, here's an easy fix for you.

pip is calling the python version in your PATH, which it gets from the Anaconda location. Behind the scenes, Arch also has a version of Python installs, which it uses for system administration. Same applies for macOS. It's usually refered to as "system Python". To bypass this, we'll temporarily remove Anaconda from our PATH, install the azure client, and reinstate the original PATH:

Warning: the following steps mess with your PATH variable. If for some reason the installation doesn't work, make sure to run the second-to-last command in the block.

echo $PATH > tmp
export PATH="/usr/local/bin:/usr/bin:/bin:/usr/local/sbin:/opt/cuda/bin:/usr/lib/jvm/default/bin:/usr/bin/site_perl:/usr/bin/vendor_perl:/usr/bin/core_perl"
curl -L https://aka.ms/InstallAzureCli | bash
export PATH="$(cat tmp)"
source ~/.bashrc

For the installation, I just used the defaults. At this point, the installation should be complete. Test with:

az login

And make sure that your Python interpreter is back to its original state with:

python -c "import sys;print('Anaconda' in sys.executable)"