Azure CLI as an exe or NuGet package

[GiridharIITM]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.
COSMIC team in M365 is working on building a service that invokes PowerShell scripts in a remote server. These PowerShell scripts in turn call az commands. However, the server doesn’t have az-CLI installed. We want to install az-CLI in a sandboxed way just for our project.

Describe the solution you'd like

1. Exporting az CLI as an exe that can be invoked directly on the server. We could get Helm and Kubectl exes to work on the server by downloading them. Something similar for az-CLI would be super helpful.
2. Exporting Az CLI as a Nuget package, which we can copy to the output build directory.

Describe alternatives you've considered

We attempted the following already:

1. Exporting the MSI installer – doesn’t work because we need admin privileges.
2. Exporting as a NuGet the CLI2 folder created during installation doesn’t work because some DLLs/exe files do not get approved when we try to upload them using expush.
3. Using pip installation on python and virtual environments- doesn’t work due to permission issues on Windows server not allowing us to pip install az CLI.

Additional context
The server we are trying to push to is highly secure and often doesn't allow us to push files or download things.

[yonzhan]

@jiasli for awareness

[gshyamMS]

Also commenting with my MS account for visibility, accidentally made this post with my personal github account.

[keystroke]

I would also like this, working in private cloud space and want to have test project for our older shipped versions of Azure services and test the functionality in a sandboxed integration test using specific drops of Azure CLI, AzurePS, etc. - This requires ability to reference versions of azurecli ideally as a nuget package and so they can be executed directly from test server.

[jiasli]

We are currently considering releasing Azure CLI as a ZIP (#22462).

Exporting as a NuGet the CLI2 folder created during installation doesn’t work because some DLLs/exe files do not get approved when we try to upload them using expush.

But since the ZIP will basically just pack the C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft SDKs\Azure\CLI2 folder, perhaps some dll/exe files will be blocked?

[gshyamMS]

It is not a guaranteed solution. We were able to download the helm zip package on the remote server and use it from there, so if the zip is made available for download it MAY work. But the zip cannot be exported into NuGet as you mentioned.

[alexander-kastil]

@jiasli it would be great to be able to use the cli from within an azure function in a language other that python, preferrable c# or typescript … a zip file would not really help