Skip to content

using-resource-types.md

Latest commit

 

History

History
129 lines (94 loc) · 5.91 KB

using-resource-types.md

File metadata and controls

129 lines (94 loc) · 5.91 KB
Raw

Discovering and Using Resource Types and Recipe Packs

This guide is for developers and platform engineers who want to find the Resource Types and Recipe Packs available in this repository and use them with Radius. Developers use Resource Types in their application definitions; platform engineers use Recipe Packs to configure how those types are provisioned in an Environment. If you want to contribute a new Resource Type or Recipe, see Contributing Resource Types and Recipes instead.

Discovering Resource Types

Resource Types in this repository are organized by category. Each category maps to a Radius.<Category> namespace and lives in a top-level directory (for example, Data/, Security/, Compute/). Within a category, each Resource Type has its own folder that contains:

  • <resourceType>.yaml — the Resource Type definition, including developer documentation and usage examples in its top-level description.
  • README.md — an overview written for platform engineers, describing the properties a Recipe consumes and produces, and referencing the Recipe Packs and the tested Recipe sources (modules) available for the type.
  • test/app.bicep — a runnable example application that uses the Resource Type.

To browse the available types, explore the category directories in this repository, or list them from an environment where they are registered:

# List the Resource Types registered in your Radius installation
rad resource-type list

# Show the developer documentation, properties, and usage examples for a type
rad resource-type show Radius.Data/mySqlDatabases

The output of rad resource-type show includes the Bicep usage example and a description of every property, so it is the fastest way to learn how to use a type once it is registered.

Registering a Resource Type

Some Resource Types ship as defaults in Radius and are available out of the box (see Default resource types in Radius). If the type you want is not already registered, register it from its definition:

rad resource-type create Radius.Data/mySqlDatabases -f Data/mySqlDatabases/mySqlDatabases.yaml

Registering the type also makes it available in Bicep through the generated extension. Your platform engineer must also configure a Recipe for the type in your Environment — Recipes for this repository are grouped into the platform Recipe Packs under recipepack/.

Discovering and using Recipe Packs

Recipe Packs live at the repository root under recipepack/. Each platform has its own folder containing a default Recipe Pack that can wire both Bicep and Terraform recipes:

  • azure/ — recipes for all types provisioned on Azure.
  • aws/ — recipes for all types provisioned on AWS.
  • kubernetes/ — recipes for all types provisioned in-cluster on Kubernetes.

Each Recipe Pack bundles the Recipes for every Resource Type on that platform together with an Environment definition, so a platform engineer configures an Environment by deploying a single Recipe Pack instead of registering Recipes one type at a time. Cloud packs (under azure/ and aws/) accept parameters for the provider configuration, such as the subscription or account the Environment provisions into.

Deploy a Recipe Pack to create and configure the Environment:

# Configure an Environment with the Azure recipe pack
rad deploy recipepack/azure/aks-recipepack.bicep

# Or start with the zero-config Kubernetes default
rad deploy recipepack/default-kubernetes/aks-recipepack.bicep

After a Recipe Pack is deployed, every Resource Type it covers can be used in an application deployed to that Environment.

Using a Resource Type in a Radius application

Once a Resource Type is registered and a Recipe is configured in your Environment, add it to your application definition:

  1. Reference the extension for the Resource Type at the top of your Bicep file.
  2. Declare the resource, providing the required properties. environment is always required, and application is required for types that belong to an application.
  3. Connect to the resource from a container, so Radius injects the connection details as environment variables.
  4. Deploy the application.
extension radius
extension mysqlDatabases

@description('The Radius environment ID')
param environment string

resource app 'Radius.Core/applications@2025-08-01-preview' = {
  name: 'myapp'
  properties: {
    environment: environment
  }
}

resource db 'Radius.Data/mySqlDatabases@2025-08-01-preview' = {
  name: 'db'
  properties: {
    environment: environment
    application: app.id
    database: 'appdb'
  }
}

resource frontend 'Radius.Compute/containers@2025-08-01-preview' = {
  name: 'frontend'
  properties: {
    environment: environment
    application: app.id
    containers: {
      web: {
        image: 'ghcr.io/radius-project/samples/demo:latest'
        ports: {
          web: {
            containerPort: 3000
          }
        }
      }
    }
    connections: {
      db: {
        source: db.id
      }
    }
  }
}

Deploy the application with the rad CLI:

rad deploy app.bicep

When a container declares a connection to a resource, Radius injects the resource's connection properties into the container as environment variables named CONNECTION_<CONNECTION-NAME>_<PROPERTY-NAME> (for example CONNECTION_DB_HOST and CONNECTION_DB_PORT).

Finding examples

Every Resource Type folder includes a test/app.bicep that shows a complete, working example, and the type's README.md documents its properties. Start from the example for the type you want, then adapt it to your application.

Learn more