CI/CD Pipelines & PAL

Introduction

This scenario is for when you no longer have the secret or cert for a service principal, but you do have permission to create or modify pipelines or workflows in your CI/CD platform. These commonly use service principals when interacting with Azure environments. Historically they would have the client secret stored as a pipeline secret whereas it is now increasingly common to leverage OpenID Connect (OIDC) using a federated workload credential.

Check the subject in the federated credential

With OpenID Connect the service principal uses a federated credential to define the trust relationship to another identity provider and the context in which that is valid. This is far more secure than having a client secret that may be used for manual authentication, exactly as shown in the section above. (Removing the maintenance overhead of rotating secrets is another benefit.)

1. Open the Entra admin portal

2. Open Entra ID > App Registrations

3. Click on All applications, filter the app registrations using the displayName or appId / clientId, and select ℹ️ If you don’t know the appId then you can search the Enterprise apps for the service principal’s objectId and retrieve the appId from there.

4. Click on Certificates and secrets to view the federated credential’s Subject identifier or claims matching expression

   

   The subject identifier for the example is repo:azurecitadel/my-terraform-workload-repo:ref:refs/heads/main, so OpenID Connect will only succeed for workflows run from this repository’s main branch. Here are the most common entity types supported for GitHub.

   Entity Type	Example
   Environment	repo:azurecitadel/my-terraform-workload-repo:environment:prod
   Branch	repo:azurecitadel/my-terraform-workload-repo:ref:refs/heads/main
   Pull request	repo:azurecitadel/my-terraform-workload-repo:pull_request
   Tag	repo:azurecitadel/my-terraform-workload-repo:ref:refs/tags/v1.0

After examining the federated credential, you can determine where the workflow needs to be run from to be successful.

Create and run a workflow

This step assumes you have the permissions to create, commit, and run workflows that meet the subject criteria in the federated credential.

1. Create a new branch, e.g. pal

2. Create a new workflow, e.g. .github/workflows/pal.yml

3. Add in the example YAML workflow

   # Partner Admin Link using the Azure CLI with OpenID Connect
   
   name: Configure PAL using the Azure CLI
   on:
     workflow_dispatch:
       inputs:
         action:
           type: choice
           description: 'Action to perform'
           default: 'Create'
           options:
             - Create
             - Delete
           required: true
         partnerId:
           description: 'Partner ID'
           required: true
   
   permissions:
         id-token: write
         contents: read
   
   jobs:
     PAL:
       runs-on: ubuntu-latest
       steps:
       - name: Login to Azure using OIDC
         uses: azure/login@v2
         with:
           tenant-id: ${{ vars.ARM_TENANT_ID }}
           client-id: ${{ vars.ARM_CLIENT_ID }}
           allow-no-subscriptions: true
   
       - name: ${{ github.event.inputs.action }} the Partner Admin Link
         uses: azure/cli@v2
         with:
           azcliversion: latest
           inlineScript: |
               az extension add --name managementpartner
               az managementpartner ${{ github.event.inputs.action == 'Create' && 'create' || 'delete' }} --partner-id ${{ github.event.inputs.partnerId }} --output jsonc            
   

   # Partner Admin Link using PowerShell with OpenID Connect
   
   name: Configure PAL using PowerShell
   on:
     workflow_dispatch:
       inputs:
         action:
           type: choice
           description: 'Action to perform'
           default: 'Create'
           options:
             - Create
             - Delete
           required: true
         partnerId:
           description: 'Partner ID'
           required: true
   
   permissions:
         id-token: write
         contents: read
   
   jobs:
     PAL:
       runs-on: ubuntu-latest
       steps:
       - name: Login to Azure using OIDC
         uses: azure/login@v2
         with:
           tenant-id: ${{ vars.ARM_TENANT_ID }}
           client-id: ${{ vars.ARM_CLIENT_ID }}
           allow-no-subscriptions: true
           enable-AzPSSession: true
   
       - name: ${{ github.event.inputs.action }} the Partner Admin Link
         uses: azure/powershell@v2
         with:
           azPSVersion: latest
           inlineScript: |
             Install-Module -Name Az.ManagementPartner -Repository PSGallery -Force
             ${{ github.event.inputs.action == 'Create' && 'New-AzManagementPartner' || 'Remove-AzManagementPartner' }} -PartnerId ${{ github.event.inputs.partnerId }}          
   

   Check your GitHub Actions secrets and variables in your GitHub repo’s Settings > Secrets and variables section. The workflows are preconfigured for common Terraform environment variables.

   • Change the prefix from vars to secrets if they are defined as secrets.
   • Change the names if required, e.g. AZURE_CLIENT_ID

   The workflow is set for manual deployment. Feel free to change the trigger.

4. Commit and push the new branch

5. Create a pull request and merge to the main branch

6. Click on Actions

7. Select the workflow

8. Click on Run workflow

Next