I’m facing an issue with Terraform Authentication to Azure while deployment while using a GitHub workflow. I’m attempting to authenticate with a service principal passed through to the providers.tf at my root module level.

My understanding is that Terraform requires ARM_ to authenticate with a service principal.
Terraform, Credentials in a terraform provider block.
Microsoft, Service Principal client secret

In my GitHub environment, there is a secret called AZURE_CREDENTIALS which is a standard convention to authenticate using the azure/login action. I’ve attempted to perform a JQL query to extract these values, but am having no value be returned. Here is the configuration specified in the documentation of this AZURE_CREDENTIAL secret:

{
    "clientSecret":  "******",
    "subscriptionId":  "******",
    "tenantId":  "******",
    "clientId":  "******"
}

JQL that I’ve attempted to use:

echo "${{ secrets.AZURE_CREDENTIALS }}" > credentials.json
export ARM_CLIENT_SECRET=$(jq -r '.clientSecret' credentials.json)
export ARM_TENANT_ID=$(jq -r '.tenantId' credentials.json)
export ARM_CLIENT_ID=$(jq -r '.clientId' credentials.json)

echo "ARM_CLIENT_SECRET=${ARM_CLIENT_SECRET}"
echo "ARM_TENANT_ID=${ARM_TENANT_ID}"
echo "ARM_CLIENT_ID=${ARM_CLIENT_ID}"

echo "::add-mask::$ARM_CLIENT_SECRET"
echo "::add-mask::$ARM_TENANT_ID"
echo "::add-mask::$ARM_CLIENT_ID"

echo "ARM_CLIENT_SECRET=${ARM_CLIENT_SECRET}" >> $GITHUB_ENV
echo "ARM_TENANT_ID=${ARM_TENANT_ID}" >> $GITHUB_ENV
echo "ARM_CLIENT_ID=${ARM_CLIENT_ID}" >> $GITHUB_ENV

Does anyone have a method of accessing the AZURE_CREDENTIALS values or should I just go ahead and create individual secrets i.e clientId, tenantId, clientSecret etc..

edit: I should mention that in my workflow the following error message is being returned:
│ Error: Error building ARM Config: Authenticating using the Azure CLI is only supported as a User (not a Service Principal).