Is there a way to capture the JSON objects from the Azure NodeJS CLI from within a NodeJS script? I could do something like exec( 'azure vm list' ) and write a promise to process the deferred stdout result, or I could hijack the process.stream.write method, but looking at the CLI code, which is quite extensive, I thought there might be a way to pass a callback to the cli function or some other option that might directly return the JSON result. I see you are using the winston logger module -- I might be familiar with this, but perhaps there is a hook there that could be used.
azure vm list does have a --json option:
C:\>azure vm list -h
help: List Azure VMs
help:
help: Usage: vm list [options]
help:
help: Options:
help: -h, --help output usage information
help: -s, --subscription <id> use the subscription id
help: -d, --dns-name <name> only show VMs for this DNS name
help: -v, --verbose use verbose output
help: --json use json output
You can get the json result in the callback of an exec(...) call. Would this work for your?
Yes you can, check this gist: https://gist.github.com/4415326 and you'll see how without doing exec. You basically override the logger hanging off the CLI.
As a side note I am about to publish a new module, azure-cli-buddy that will make it easy to call the CLI using this technique and to receive results in JSON.