az account set: Subscriptions & Common CI Errors

Choose which Azure subscription the CLI operates against.

az account set selects the active subscription for subsequent Azure CLI commands. When an identity has access to several subscriptions, this is how you target the right one in CI.

What it does

az account set --subscription <id-or-name> changes the default subscription stored in the CLI’s profile. All later commands operate against it unless overridden per-command with --subscription. az account show confirms the current selection, and az account list enumerates available subscriptions.

Common usage

# Set the active subscription by ID (preferred) or name
az account set --subscription "00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000000"

# Confirm what is active
az account show --query "{name:name, id:id}" -o table

# List all accessible subscriptions
az account list --query "[].{name:name, id:id}" -o table

Common error in CI: "subscription ... not found" / wrong default

Commands fail with "The subscription of \"...\" doesn't exist in cloud \"AzureCloud\"" when the name/ID is wrong or the logged-in identity has no access to it, or operations silently hit the wrong subscription because the default was never set. Fix: set the subscription explicitly by GUID (names are ambiguous across tenants) right after az login, and verify with az account show. If "not found" persists, the service principal lacks a role assignment on that subscription - grant it (e.g. Contributor scoped to the subscription).

Key options

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