Overview of the ‘kind’ property for App Service

We get a lot of questions on the App Service kind property, so we are sharing some information to help you understand what it is, what it does, and how to use it.

In general, kind is an ARM envelop property so almost every resource in Azure has one. See Resources - Get for more information on Azure resource properties. The way in which resources use this property varies service by service.

There are several different offerings in the Azure portal that use the same underlying Microsoft.Web\Sites resource. App Service at this time only uses the value of the kind property to specialize the UX of a Microsoft.Web\Sites resource in the Azure Portal. The value isn’t used for anything in the management plane.

The kind property of an app is set during the create flow and can’t be modified thereafter. The portal does this based on the create flow of your choice and/or the configuration you enter. This is also true of the App Service CLI and other clients like Visual Studio Code. You will need to manually set the kind property if you are creating resources through ARM templates, or using the ARM API directly.

Note that the kind property also shows up in App Service Plans (ASP). At this time, the value of this property for the ASP is meaningless and has no impact on your resource. For example, you can set kind to “Linux” for the ASP, but that won’t make your ASP a Linux ASP; the reserved property is what makes this distinction (if reserved = true, it’s a Linux ASP, otherwise it’s a Windows ASP).

For more information on how App Service uses the kind property as well as the current list of recommended values, visit the App Service Linux docs repo.