Provisioning an AI Search Service

1. Start Locally

Firstly, we need to launch Locally which we can do from a terminal by running:

Once Locally has started, the Locally Dashboard will open automatically:

2. Create a Resource Group

Next we can create the Resource Group:

There's two things to note here:

1. The Azure CLI supports Automatic Configuration, meaning that it can automatically be configured to work against Locally just by prefixing commands with locally run.
2. Locally intentionally uses a different set of locations to Azure as a safety precaution, so that you can be confident you're deploying against Locally rather than regular Azure. You can also configure Locally to use the Azure locations too, but you'll want to be extra sure that you're prefixing commands with locally run when you do.

3. Create the search service

With the Resource Group in place, we can create the search service:

{
  "name": "samplesearch1",
  "partitions": 1,
  "replicas": 1,
  "sku": "basic",
  "status": "running"
}

replicas and partitions are what you'd scale to change query throughput and index size respectively; both default to 1.

4. Read the admin key and list services

We can read the service's admin key, as you would in Azure:

We can list the services in the Resource Group:

We can see the Search Service in the Locally Dashboard too:

5. Tidy up

Finally, we can tidy up. To remove the Resource Group and everything within it:

There's nothing billable to clean up, since everything ran on your machine, but it's still worth checking your teardown scripts work here before you run them against Azure.

Doing this with other tooling

Whilst this guide used the Azure CLI, AI Search works the same way through any of the tooling that Locally supports - a Microsoft.Search/searchServices resource in HashiCorp Terraform or OpenTofu, Pulumi, Bicep or an ARM Template all provision against Locally in the same way, with only the location changed.

Next steps

To check the search service and the rest of a template before you deploy it, see the ARM Deployments walkthrough. To run these commands on every push, see Using Locally in CI.

Should you encounter any issues, please take a look at the troubleshooting section.