With the Azure Policy Compliance Scan action, you can now easily trigger a on demand scan from your GitHub workflow on one or multiple resources, resource groups or subscriptions, and continue/fail the workflow based on the compliance state of resources. You can also use this Github Action to generate a report on the compliance state of scanned resources for further analysis or archiving.

New to Azure Policy? Its an Azure service that lets you enforce organizational standards and asses compliance at scale. To know more check out: Azure Policies - Overview

The definition of this Github Action is in action.yml.

• scopes: mandatory. Takes a full identifier for one or more azure resources, resource groups or subscriptions. The on-demand policy compliance scan is triggered for all of these. The identifier(resource ID or the subscription ID) can generally be found in the properties section of the resource in Azure Portal.
• scopes-ignore: Optional. Takes full identifier for one or more azure resources, resource groups. If the resources are found non-compliant after the scan completion, the action fails. However, in this input you can specify resources or resource groups for which the compliance state will be ignored. The action will pass irrespective of the compliance state of these resources. In case you want the action to always pass irrespective of the compliance state of resources, you can set its value as 'all'.
• policy-assignments-ignore: Optional. Takes full identifier for one or more policy assignments ids. If the resources are found non-compliant for given policy after the scan completion, the action fails. However, in this input you can specify policy assignments ids for which the compliance state will be ignored. The action will pass irrespective of the compliance state of these policies.
• wait: Optional. Depending on the breadth, the time taken for compliance scan can range from a few minutes to several hours. By default, the action will wait for the compliance scan to complete and succeed or fail based on the compliance state of resources. However, you can mark this input as false, in which case the action will trigger the compliance scan and succeed immediately. The status of the triggered scan and the compliance state of resources would have to be then viewed in activity log of the resource in Azure portal.
• skip-report: Optional. Defaults to false. If false, the action will upload a CSV file containing a list of resources that are non-compliant after the triggered scan is complete. The CSV file can be downloaded as an artifact from the workflow run for manual analysis. Note that the number of rows in CSV are capped at 100,000.
• report-name: Optional. The filename for the CSV to be uploaded. Ignored if skip-report is set to true.

• Azure Login Action: Authenticate using Azure Login action. The Policy Compliance Scan action assumes that Azure Login is done using an Azure service principal that has sufficient permissions to trigger azure policy compliance scan on selected scopes. Once login is done, the next set of Actions in the workflow can perform tasks such as triggering the compliance scan and fetching the compliance state of resources. For more details, checkout 'Configure credentials for Azure login action' section in this file or alternatively you can refer the full documentation of Azure Login Action.

This action is supported for the Azure public cloud as well as Azure government clouds ('AzureUSGovernment' or 'AzureChinaCloud') and Azure Stack ('AzureStack') Hub. Before running this action, login to the respective Azure Cloud using Azure Login by setting appropriate value for the environment parameter.

# File: .github/workflows/workflow.yml

on: push

jobs:
  assess-policy-compliance:    
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
    # Azure Login       
    - name: Login to Azure
      uses: azure/login@v1
      with:
        creds: ${{secrets.AZURE_CREDENTIALS}} 
    
    - name: Check for resource compliance
      uses: azure/policy-compliance-scan@v0
      with:
        scopes: |
          /subscriptions/xxxxxxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxxxxxxxxxx
        

The above workflow will trigger a policy compliance scan on the provided subscription, wait till the scan is complete, fetch the latest compliance state of resources and upload a CSV file containing the list of non compliant resources and the associated policy assignments. The action will fail if there are any non-compliant resources.

# File: .github/workflows/workflow.yml

on: push

jobs:
  assess-policy-compliance:    
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
    # Azure Login       
    - name: Login to Azure
      uses: azure/login@v1
      with:
        creds: ${{secrets.AZURE_CREDENTIALS}} 
    
    - name: Check for resource compliance
      uses: azure/policy-compliance-scan@v0
      with:
        scopes: |
          /subscriptions/xxxxxxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxxxxxxxxxx/resourceGroups/QA               
        scopes-ignore: |
          /subscriptions/xxxxxxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxxxxxxxxxx/resourceGroups/QA/providers/Microsoft.Web/sites/demoApp
        

The above workflow will trigger a policy compliance scan on the 'QA' resource group. After the scan is complete, it will fetch the compliance state of resources. The action will fail if there are any non-compliant resources except for 'demoApp' resource.

# File: .github/workflows/workflow.yml

on: push

jobs:
  assess-policy-compliance:    
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
    # Azure Login       
    - name: Login to Azure
      uses: azure/login@v1
      with:
        creds: ${{secrets.AZURE_CREDENTIALS}} 
    
    - name: Check for resource compliance
      uses: azure/policy-compliance-scan@v0
      with:
        scopes: |
          /subscriptions/xxxxxxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxxxxxxxxxx/resourceGroups/QA/providers/Microsoft.Web/sites/demoApp
          /subscriptions/xxxxxxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxxxxxxxxxx/resourceGroups/QA/providers/Microsoft.Compute/virtualMachines/my-vm
        policy-assignments-ignore: |
          /subscriptions/xxxxxxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxxxxxxxxxx/providers/Microsoft.Authorization/policyAssignments/SecurityCenterBuiltIn
        

The above workflow will trigger a policy compliance scan on the two resources - demoApp and my-vm. After the scan is complete, it will fetch the compliance state of the two resources. The action will fail if any of the two resources is non-compliant except on Azure Security Center built-in policies.

# File: .github/workflows/workflow.yml

on: push

jobs:
  assess-policy-compliance:    
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
    # Azure Login       
    - name: Login to Azure
      uses: azure/login@v1
      with:
        creds: ${{secrets.AZURE_CREDENTIALS}} 
    
    - name: Check for resource compliance
      uses: azure/policy-compliance-scan@v0
      with:
        scopes: |
          /subscriptions/xxxxxxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxxxxxxxxxx
        wait: false
    - run: |
        echo 'Running scripts...'
        

The above workflow will trigger a policy compliance scan on the provided subscription and proceed to the next step without waiting for the compliance scan to be complete. In this case the triggering of scan is successful, then the action will be marked as passed. To see the progress/result of scan, the user can refer the activity logs for the subscription or resource group.

With the Azure login Action, you can perform an Azure login using Azure service principal. The credentials of Azure Service Principal can be added as secrets in the GitHub repository and then used in the workflow. Follow the below steps to generate credentials and store in github.

• Prerequisite: You should have installed Azure cli on your local machine to run the command or use the cloudshell in the Azure portal. To install Azure cli, follow Install Azure Cli. To use cloudshell, follow CloudShell Quickstart. After you have one of the above ready, follow these steps:

• Run the below Azure cli command and copy the output JSON object to your clipboard.

  
   az ad sp create-for-rbac --name "myApp" --role contributor \
                            --scopes /subscriptions/{subscription-id} \
                            --sdk-auth
                            
  # Replace {subscription-id} with the subscription identifiers
  
  # The command should output a JSON object similar to this:

  {
    "clientId": "<GUID>",
    "clientSecret": "<GUID>",
    "subscriptionId": "<GUID>",
    "tenantId": "<GUID>",
    (...)
  }
  

• Define a 'New secret' under your GitHub repository settings -> 'Secrets' menu. Lets name it 'AZURE_CREDENTIALS'.
• Paste the contents of the clipboard as the value of the above secret variable.
• Use the secret variable in the Azure Login Action(Refer to the examples above)

If needed, you can modify the Azure CLI command to further reduce the scope for which permissions are provided. Here is the command that gives contributor access to only a resource group.

  
   az ad sp create-for-rbac --name "myApp" --role contributor \
                            --scopes /subscriptions/{subscription-id}/resourceGroups/{resource-group} \
                            --sdk-auth
                            
  # Replace {subscription-id}, {resource-group} with the subscription and resource group identifiers.
  

You can also provide permissions to multiple scopes using the Azure CLI command:

  
   az ad sp create-for-rbac --name "myApp" --role contributor \
                            --scopes /subscriptions/{subscription-id}/resourceGroups/{resource-group1} \
                            /subscriptions/{subscription-id}/resourceGroups/{resource-group2} \
                            --sdk-auth
                            
  # Replace {subscription-id}, {resource-group1}, {resource-group2} with the subscription and resource group identifiers.
  

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