Bicep downloads statistics

Provides Bicep language support. Features:

• Syntax highlighting • LSP-based resolve and completion

What is Bicep?

Bicep is a Domain Specific Language (DSL) for deploying Azure resources declaratively. It aims to drastically simplify the authoring experience with a cleaner syntax, improved type safety, and better support for modularity and code re-use. Bicep is a transparent abstraction over ARM and ARM templates, which means anything that can be done in an ARM Template can be done in Bicep. All resource types, apiVersions, and properties that are valid in an ARM template are equally valid in Bicep on day one (Note: even if Bicep warns that type information is not available for a resource, it can still be deployed).

Bicep code is transpiled to standard ARM Template JSON files, which effectively treats the ARM Template as an Intermediate Language (IL).

Goals

• Build the best possible language for describing, validating, and deploying infrastructure to Azure. • The language should provide a transparent abstraction for the underlying platform. There must be no "onboarding step" to enable Bicep support for a new resource type and/or api version. • Code should be easy to understand at a glance and straightforward to learn, regardless of your experience with other programming languages. • Users should be given a lot of freedom to modularize and re-use their code. Code re-use should not require any 'copy/paste'-ing. • Tooling should provide a high level of resource discoverability and validation, and should be developed alongside the compiler rather than added at the end. • Users should have a high level of confidence that their code is 'syntactically valid' before deploying.

Non-goals

• Build a general purpose language to meet any need. This will not replace general purpose languages and you may still need to do pre or post-Bicep execution tasks in a script or high-level programming language. • Provide a first-class provider model for non-Azure related tasks. While we will likely introduce an extensibility model at some point, any extension points are intended to be focused on Azure infra or application deployment related tasks.

How does Bicep work?

Both Az CLI (2.20.0+) and the PowerShell Az module (v5.6.0+) have Bicep support built-in. This means you can use the standard deployment commands with your *.bicep files and the tooling will transpile the code and send it to ARM on your behalf. For example, to deploy main.bicep to a resource group my-rg, we can use the CLI command we are already used to: az deployment group create -f ./main.bicep -g my-rg For more detail on taking advantage of new Bicep constructs that replace an equivalent from ARM Templates, you can read the moving from ARM => Bicep doc.