Use existing OpenAI & Search Resources

[cameronjy]

Is there a method to deploy this app using my existing OpenAI and Azure Search resources? I already have these resources deployed and would prefer to reuse them instead of deploying new ones.

Currently, deployment fails because my OpenAI resource constraints prevent me from deploying an additional ChatGPT-4o model due to insufficient quota.

[davidxw]

The current bicep templates we've created for Azure Chat assumes that you are setting up everything from scratch in a specific resource group so no, there isn't a switch or flag or override you can supply to use existing resources.

You could modify the templates to do this however - add a parameter to main.bicep with name of your existing resource, propagate the value of this parameter to an equivalent new parameter in the resources.bicep file, and then swap the resource definitions out for an existing resource reference. If these resources are in a difference resource group you would also need to pass this in as a new param, and set the scope of the existing resources accordingly.

Unfortunately bicep doesn't make it easy to do this conditionally (i.e. have a template that can optionally create resources or use existing resources) as while you can conditionally create a resource you end up with two different resource references in your template and then have to check which one to use every time you use that reference (see here). This could be fixed with an "if ... else" construct but that doesn't exist yet.

An equally hacky (but less bicepy) option is to just deploy all the new resources and then update the app config to point to existing resources.

[anna-csswe]

@cameronjy This worked for me:

1. Run azd init from the root directory of your local repo
2. Run azd auth login
3. Set environment variables for existing resources:

• azd env set AZURE_RESOURCE_GROUP <name_of_resource_group>
• azd env set AZURE_LOCATION <name_of_resource_location>
• azd env set AZURE_SUBSCRIPTION_ID <name_of_subscription_id>
• azd env set AZURE_APP_SERVICE <name_of_app_service>
• azd env set AZURE_APP_SERVICE_PLAN <name_of_app_service_plan>
• azd env set AZURE_OPENAI_SERVICE <name_of_openai_service>
• azd env set AZURE_SEARCH_SERVICE <name_of_search_service>

4. Verify environment variables were stored in root_directory/.azure/<env_name>/.env
5. Run azd deploy

I didn't make any changes to the bicep file, and deployment usually takes 4-11 minutes.