Internal documentation for contributors and AI coding agents working on the Azure Developer CLI (azd).

For end-user documentation, see aka.ms/azd. For template examples, see awesome-azd.

Core mental models, terminology, and feature lifecycle.

• Glossary — Key terms and concepts used throughout the codebase
• Feature Stages — How features graduate from alpha → beta → stable
• Alpha Features — How experimental features are gated and discovered

Task-oriented how-tos for common contributor workflows.

• Contributing — How to build, test, lint, and submit changes
• Adding a New Command — End-to-end walkthrough for new CLI commands
• Creating an Extension — How to build and publish an azd extension
• Observability and Tracing — Adding telemetry, traces, and debugging
• Feature Telemetry Guide — End-to-end guide for instrumenting telemetry in new features
• Telemetry Overview — Product-facing overview of azd telemetry metrics

Schemas, flags, environment variables, and configuration details.

• Environment Variables — All environment variables that configure azd behavior
• azure.yaml Schema — Project configuration file reference
• Feature Status — Current maturity status of all features
• Telemetry Data Reference — Complete schema of all telemetry events and fields

System overviews, design context, and decision records.

• System Overview — High-level architecture and code organization
• Command Execution Model — How commands are registered, resolved, and run
• Extension Framework — gRPC-based extension system architecture
• Provisioning Pipeline — How infrastructure provisioning works
• Telemetry Architecture — How azd collects and exports telemetry
• ADR Template — Template for lightweight architecture decision records

• AGENTS.md — AI agent coding instructions
• cli/azd/docs/ — Detailed implementation-level documentation
• cli/azd/docs/style-guidelines/ — Code style guide
• cli/azd/docs/extensions/ — Extension framework details