Provisioning an IoT Hub

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 IoT Hub

With the Resource Group in place, we can create the IoT Hub. The partition count is fixed at creation, so it's worth thinking about up front:

{
  "hostname": "sampleiothub1.iothub.locally",
  "name": "sampleiothub1",
  "sku": "F1",
  "state": "Active"
}

That iothub.locally hostname is served by Locally's own DNS server and points at the IoT Hub Emulator running on your machine.

4. Get the connection string

To connect anything to the hub we need its connection string:

5. Register a device

A hub with no devices doesn't do much, and Locally has built-in helpers for managing them:

Each device has a twin - the document holding its desired and reported state - which you can inspect and update:

We can also list the hubs in the Resource Group:

6. 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, IoT Hub works the same way through any of the tooling that Locally supports - a Microsoft.Devices/IotHubs 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

Device telemetry lands in the hub's built-in endpoint, served by Event Hubs. The IoT Hub Emulator covers what else devices can do.

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