Provisioning a Virtual Network

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 Virtual Network

With the Resource Group in place, we can create the Virtual Network. A virtual network needs an address space, and it's usually convenient to create a first subnet at the same time:

{
  "name": "sample-vnet",
  "prefixes": [
    "10.0.0.0/16"
  ],
  "state": "Succeeded",
  "subnets": [
    {
      "name": "internal",
      "prefix": "10.0.1.0/24"
    }
  ]
}

Most networks end up with more than one subnet, so let's add a second. Subnet prefixes have to sit inside the virtual network's address space and must not overlap each other:

{
  "name": "workloads",
  "prefix": "10.0.2.0/24",
  "state": "Succeeded"
}

We can confirm both are there:

Name       Prefix
---------  -----------
internal   10.0.1.0/24
workloads  10.0.2.0/24

We can see the Virtual Network in the Locally Dashboard too:

4. 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, Virtual Networks work the same way through any of the tooling that Locally supports - a Microsoft.Network/virtualNetworks 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 control what traffic a subnet allows, add a Network Security Group, and give it outbound access with a NAT Gateway. To reach Virtual Machines in the network without a Public IP, see Bastion.

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