Mark Wragg

Mark Wragg

Windows DevOps Engineer and PowerShell fanatic. IT Contractor. Director @ MPFE Consultancy Ltd.

I have recently added tasks in to our Azure DevOps ARM template deployment pipeline to run the new -WhatIf parameter on the New-AzResourceGroupDeployment to preview the changes an ARM deployment will make, per this guide:

  • https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/azure-resource-manager/templates/template-deploy-what-if?tabs=azure-powershell

ARM deployment whatif example

This week I discovered that my ARM template validation tasks were no longer working in my pipeline. This was curious because I hadn’t changed the script or ARM template since it last ran successfully. The error being returned was:

InvalidTemplate - Deployment template validation failed: ‘Template parameter JToken type is not valid. Expected ‘String, Uri’. Actual ‘Object’. Please see https://aka.ms/resource-manager-parameter-files for usage details.’.

Jtoken type is not valid

I eventually discovered this issue:

  • https://github.com/Azure/azure-powershell/issues/12792

Which indicates the problem is due to a bug in the Az module and how it handles SecureString typed inputs.

The bug has apparently been fixed in version 4.7.0 of the Az module, but if you’re using the Azure DevOps hosted agent “vs2017-win2016” then that version of Az is not currently available (as of 29th Sept 2020). The workaround is therefore to rollback to using an older version of the Az module. After a bit of trial and error the version that worked for me was 4.3.0. Simply set the “Preferred Azure PowerShell Version” setting on your Azure PowerShell tasks to this and you should no longer experience the bug.

Obviously once 4.7.0 is available on the agent image you can revert to using the latest Az version again.

Updated:

Comments

You May Also Enjoy

Converting Azure DevOps Classic Release deployment pipelines to YAML

17 minute read

I recently migrated some Azure DevOps Classic Release deployment pipelines to YAML. There’s obvious benefits to storing your pipelines as code: they become an artifact in source control that can evolve and change as the code they build or deploy does, and you have the benefits of version history and maintaining the pipelines via pull requests. However I also found that I could use logic and expressions to make the pipelines more efficient and easier to maintain and that through templating could easily connect the pipelines together to form what I humorously dubbed the “super pipeline” (but ...

Monitor and manage your Azure cloud costs with a little help from PowerShell

14 minute read

Should cloud computing be illegal? Probably not, but it is incredibly easy to get started, equally difficult to stop, and before you know it you could be selling your grandmother just to afford one more month of that delicious compute. Hopefully your circumstances never get that dire, but I’ve seen plenty of companies entrench themselves into the highly addictive world of automated, scalable infrastructure, but then struggle to understand the often-astronomical monthly bill.

Perform Currency Conversions with PowerShell

7 minute read

I’ve recently been working on a PowerShell module for exploring Azure costs and while doing so added some functionality to allow the costs to be converted between different currencies. It occurred to me that this functionality would be useful as a module of its own, and when I searched around I didn’t find too many recent examples for the same. As such I’ve now developed and published a module in the PowerShell Gallery and on GitHub called CurrencyConverter.