Linters are a very powerfull tool to validate if your code is correct. With the new az bicep lint --file $file command you can validate if your Bicep and Bicepparam files are correct. This command is available in the Azure CLI and can be used in a GitHub Action.
When changing the Bicep files in a pull request, you can use the az bicep lint --file $file command to validate the Bicep files. This command will validate the syntax of the Bicep files and will also validate if the resources are valid. This is a great way to validate your Bicep files before deploying them to Azure.
When adding or removing a parameter from the Bicep template, I often forget to change all the Bicepparam files and when deploying to the Production environment in Azure, the deployment wiil fail because the Bicepparam file isn’t correct. To prevent this, I created a GitHub Workflow that will validate the Bicep and the Bicepparam files when a pull request is created or updated. This way, I can’t forget to update the Bicepparam files.
The Bicep Linter GitHub Workflow file
Checkout code
To only Lint the files that has been changed, and not Lint the entire repository, I use the actions/checkout@v4 action with the fetch-depth: 0 parameter to fetch all history for all branches and tags. This way, the git diff command can be used to get the changed files.
Get changed files
With the git diff HEAD~1 --name-only command, I get all the changed files in the pull request. The --name-only parameter will only return the file names and not the content of the files. The HEAD~1 parameter will compare the changed files with the main branch. This way, only the changed files in the pull request will be returned.
Get the changed folder
Now we only have the files that has been changed, with the xargs dirname command, we can get the folders of the changed files. Because the Bicep file has change, the Bicepparam files in the same folder should be validated as well.
Find the Bicep and Bicepparam files
With the find $CHANGED_FOLDERS \( -name "*.bicep" -o -name "*.bicepparam" \) command we get all the Bicep and Bicepparam files in the folders that has been changed. The -o parameter is a logical OR, so we get all the files that ends with .bicep or .bicepparam.
Lint the Bicep and Bicepparam files
Let’s Lint the files! With a for loop, we can loop through all the files and run the az bicep lint --file $file command. The --file parameter is the file that needs to be linted.
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