Unable to deploy an AKS using GitLab CI/CD - gitlab

Question

I'm trying to deploy a Kubernetes cluster on Azure using the following GitLab pipeline
image:
name: hashicorp/terraform:1.2.3
entrypoint:
- '/usr/bin/env'
- 'PATH=/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/bin'
variables:
TF_ROOT: ${CI_PROJECT_DIR}/infrastructure
TF_ADDRESS: ${CI_API_V4_URL}/projects/${CI_PROJECT_ID}/terraform/state/${CI_PROJECT_NAME}
cache:
key: my-services
paths:
- ${TF_ROOT}/.terraform
before_script:
- cd ${TF_ROOT}
- rm -rf .terraform
- terraform --version
- terraform init
stages:
- terraform_validate
- terraform_plan
- terraform_apply
terraform_validate_dev:
stage: terraform_validate
environment:
name: development
script:
- terraform validate
rules:
- if: $CI_COMMIT_BRANCH != $CI_DEFAULT_BRANCH
terraform_plan_dev:
stage: terraform_plan
environment:
name: development
script:
- terraform plan
- terraform plan-json
dependencies:
- terraform_validate_dev
artifacts:
name: plan deployment
paths:
- ${TF_ROOT}/plan.cache
reports:
terraform: ${TF_ROOT}/plan.json
rules:
- if: $CI_COMMIT_BRANCH == "development"
terraform_apply_dev:
stage: terraform_apply
environment:
name: development
script:
- terraform apply
dependencies:
- terraform_plan_dev
rules:
- if: $CI_COMMIT_BRANCH == "development"
when: manual
but during the terraform_plan stage, I receive the following error:
"Error: building AzureRM Client: please ensure you have installed Azure CLI version 2.0.79 or newer. Error parsing json result from the Azure CLI: launching Azure CLI: exec: "az": executable file not found in $PATH."
Any idea?

Answer 1

Finally, I was able to find the problem.
Unfortunately, the solution proposed by #sytech did not solve the problem but helped me discover the real problem.
As a good practice, automated tools that want to deploy or use Azure services should always use service principals. For that reason, I created a service principal in Azure and was trying to use it with my Terraform code.
As the documentation says, to use the service principal we need to create the following environment variables:
ARM_CLIENT_ID
ARM_CLIENT_SECRET
ARM_SUBSCRIPTION_ID
ARM_TENANT_ID
Once I added these environment variables the terraform_plan stage was able to complete its work.

Answer 2

As the error message explains, you must install azure CLI.
For example:
# ...
before_script:
- curl -L https://aka.ms/InstallAzureCli | bash
# ...