Connect To SharePoint Online Using Azure AD App Only In Azure Automation

Step 3

Now after clicking on Browse Gallery, select the pnp.powershell as this module is not available by default.

Step 4

And click on import to include in your Automation account.

Step 5

Now create the certificate - Go to the Certificate tab in your Shared Resources of Automation account. Upload the certificate(pfx) generated at the end of Step 1 and enter the password given while creating the Azure AD app in Step 1.

Step 6 - Create the credentials

Go to the Credentials, and add the new credential. We can add a new user name and password (which is the same which we have given while creating an Azure AD app in this case it's "password").

Create a new runbook and authenticate SharePoint using PnP.PowerShell

Step 1

Create a new Azure runbook with the type PowerShell.

Step 2

Edit the runbook created and paste the below code. In this, we are connecting with SharePoint using PnP.PowerShell.

Change the below code to include your appid (created in step 1) and appAdTenant (name of your tenant). For best practice store these in the Automation variable but let's use them here only.

$azureAutomateCreds = Get-AutomationPSCredential -Name 'AzureAppCertPassword'
$appCert = Get-AutomationCertificate -Name "AzureAppCertificate"
$baseSite = "https://sp1226.sharepoint.com/sites/portal"
$appId = "81ea6af4-0b27-4b8f-9f82-9e06954d6244"
$appAdTenant = "sp1226.onmicrosoft.com"
 $base64Cert = [System.Convert]::ToBase64String($appCert.Export([System.Security.Cryptography.X509Certificates.X509ContentType]::Pkcs12, $azureAutomateCreds.Password))
 # Connect to the standard SharePoint Site
 $siteConn = Connect-PnPOnline -ClientId $appId -CertificateBase64Encoded $base64Cert -CertificatePassword $azureAutomateCreds.Password -Url $baseSite -Tenant $appAdTenant -ReturnConnection
 $web = Get-PnPWeb -Connection $siteConn
 $web.Title
 $list = New-PnPList -Title "Demo List" -Url "lists/DemoList" -Template Announcements
 $list.Title

Test the solution

Now you can save the Azure runbook created and publish it. It's now ready to be used, We can test it using the Test pane. In this code, we are getting the Title of the Site and creating a new list on the same site. As you can see here “Portal” is the title of the site collection and “Demo List” is the title of the newly created List.

Final Thoughts

In this exercise, we see how we can use the Azure Automation account to create a runbook and then getting the title of the site and creating a list. Further Automation Runbooks can be configured to run in several ways: manually, from a schedule, from other Runbooks or PowerShell scripts, or using a Webhook. A good use case may be to provision a SharePoint site collection and apply the template on the newly created site.

Hope you learn something!!