New-AzureRmResourceGroupDeployment : A parameter cannot be found that matches parameter name '_artifactsLocationSasToken'

Question

I was changing an ARM template (including linked templates) that was working for months. After building successfully, when deploying I got the error

New-AzureRmResourceGroupDeployment : A parameter cannot be found that matches parameter name '_artifactsLocationSasToken'

Answer 1

I knew that uploading artifacts sometimes is a somewhat sensitive business, so I checked out corresponding posts to get hints - among them this one that seemed helpful. But nothing had an effect, so I took a break.

After coming back I thoroughly checked my template and

1. found one right parenthesis too much in a medium complex concat/parameter/variable expression (highlighted with a 1 character wide squiggly line)
2. found that I missed closing curly braces and square brackets at another place (after applying a "Format Document" on the template)

Hence my take on that: do not rely on the Build process; don't get misled by the error message; when having this kind of error re-check the template, even shrink it down to isolate invalid areas

Answer 2

In my case, the error was caused by an invalid template path (parameter -TemplateFile). I had defined another parameter in the template file, but since the deployment command could not find the template itself, it could also not find the value for my user-defined parameter inside the template.

It seems that this error is a generic message invoked by Powershell, if the supplied parameter is empty. It would be nice the New-AzureRmResourceGroupDeployment command would perform some validation of the parameters, like checking if the template file exists and if the format of the template file is valid... These generic PS error messages are not very helpful.