Overview

One of the goals of Infrastructure as Code is to allow the templates to be reusable. To enable this in Bicep, rather than hardcoding values in the templates themselves, you would use a separate parameter file. Originally, only the JSON based parameter file that was used for the ARM Templates could be used but now you can use a Bicep parameter file with the .bicepparam extension.

Both accomplish the same thing but the Bicep parameter file provides a more readable syntax - the same difference between ARM Templates and Bicep.

Examples

main.bicep

Example main.bicep file. There is a list of parameters - some optional because they have default values set and one that does not have a default value.

parameters.json

JSON parameter file.

parameters.bicepparam

Bicep parameter file that cleans up the readability and requires only 3 lines of code (not including blank)

Additional Resources

Learn Bicep - https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/azure-resource-manager/bicep/overview?tabs=bicep

Using Parameter files - https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/azure-resource-manager/bicep/parameter-files?tabs=Bicep