Manage your Azure Search service with PowerShell

2 minutes to read Contributors

This topic describes the PowerShell commands to perform many of the management tasks for Azure Search services. We will walk through creating a search service, scaling it, and managing its API keys. These commands parallel the management options available in the Azure Search Management REST API.

Prerequisites

  • You must have Azure PowerShell 1.0 or greater. For instructions, see Install and configure Azure PowerShell.
  • You must be logged in to your Azure subscription in PowerShell as described below.

First, you must login to Azure with this command:

Login-AzureRmAccount

Specify the email address of your Azure account and its password in the Microsoft Azure login dialog.

Alternatively you can login non-interactively with a service principal.

If you have multiple Azure subscriptions, you need to set your Azure subscription. To see a list of your current subscriptions, run this command.

Get-AzureRmSubscription | sort SubscriptionName | Select SubscriptionName

To specify the subscription, run the following command. In the following example, the subscription name is ContosoSubscription.

Select-AzureRmSubscription -SubscriptionName ContosoSubscription

Commands to help you get started

$serviceName = "your-service-name-lowercase-with-dashes"
$sku = "free" # or "basic" or "standard" for paid services
$location = "West US"
# You can get a list of potential locations with
# (Get-AzureRmResourceProvider -ListAvailable | Where-Object {$_.ProviderNamespace -eq 'Microsoft.Search'}).Locations
$resourceGroupName = "YourResourceGroup" 
# If you don't already have this resource group, you can create it with 
# New-AzureRmResourceGroup -Name $resourceGroupName -Location $location

# Register the ARM provider idempotently. This must be done once per subscription
Register-AzureRmResourceProvider -ProviderNamespace "Microsoft.Search"

# Create a new search service
# This command will return once the service is fully created
New-AzureRmResourceGroupDeployment `
    -ResourceGroupName $resourceGroupName `
    -TemplateUri "https://gallery.azure.com/artifact/20151001/Microsoft.Search.1.0.9/DeploymentTemplates/searchServiceDefaultTemplate.json" `
    -NameFromTemplate $serviceName `
    -Sku $sku `
    -Location $location `
    -PartitionCount 1 `
    -ReplicaCount 1

# Get information about your new service and store it in $resource
$resource = Get-AzureRmResource `
    -ResourceType "Microsoft.Search/searchServices" `
    -ResourceGroupName $resourceGroupName `
    -ResourceName $serviceName `
    -ApiVersion 2015-08-19

# View your resource
$resource

# Get the primary admin API key
$primaryKey = (Invoke-AzureRmResourceAction `
    -Action listAdminKeys `
    -ResourceId $resource.ResourceId `
    -ApiVersion 2015-08-19).PrimaryKey

# Regenerate the secondary admin API Key
$secondaryKey = (Invoke-AzureRmResourceAction `
    -ResourceType "Microsoft.Search/searchServices/regenerateAdminKey" `
    -ResourceGroupName $resourceGroupName `
    -ResourceName $serviceName `
    -ApiVersion 2015-08-19 `
    -Action secondary).SecondaryKey

# Create a query key for read only access to your indexes
$queryKeyDescription = "query-key-created-from-powershell"
$queryKey = (Invoke-AzureRmResourceAction `
    -ResourceType "Microsoft.Search/searchServices/createQueryKey" `
    -ResourceGroupName $resourceGroupName `
    -ResourceName $serviceName `
    -ApiVersion 2015-08-19 `
    -Action $queryKeyDescription).Key

# View your query key
$queryKey

# Delete query key
Remove-AzureRmResource `
    -ResourceType "Microsoft.Search/searchServices/deleteQueryKey/$($queryKey)" `
    -ResourceGroupName $resourceGroupName `
    -ResourceName $serviceName `
    -ApiVersion 2015-08-19

# Scale your service up
# Note that this will only work if you made a non "free" service
# This command will not return until the operation is finished
# It can take 15 minutes or more to provision the additional resources
$resource.Properties.ReplicaCount = 2
$resource | Set-AzureRmResource

# Delete your service
# Deleting your service will delete all indexes and data in the service
$resource | Remove-AzureRmResource

Next Steps

Now that your service is created, you can take the next steps: build an index, query an index, and finally create and manage your own search application that uses Azure Search.