AzureFS

A FUSE wrapper for Azure Blob Storage. It provides basic functionality to mount Azure Blob Storage as a local filesystem to your computer.

:warning: NOTE: This project is quite old and should only be used for simple use cases. It is not recommended for production use. Please check out Azure File Service which provides you a SMB/CIFS share on the cloud as it may fit better for your use case

Introduction & Aim

There is no user-friendly interface to manage files on Azure cloud storage. Sometimes we need to:

• list files under a container
• transfer a bunch of local files to the cloud
• remove files matching a specific name pattern
• rename files on the cloud
• move files across containers

AzureFS is a command-line interface where you can mount your Windows Azure storage account as a folder on your computer and accomplish such everyday tasks practically using UNIX commands like ls, mkdir, cp etc.

It is neither rock-solid nor should be used except for manual tasks. Your programs should communicate Windows Azure Storage service via its REST API.

Installation

This project requires fusepy:

git clone https://github.com/terencehonles/fusepy.git
cd fusepy
sudo python setup.py install

Install azure-sdk-for-python. Run sudo easy_install azure or sudo pip install azure or

git clone git://github.com/Azure/azure-sdk-for-python.git
cd azure-sdk-for-python
python setup.py install

Install libfuse2, fuse-utils and libfuse-dev dependencies. On Debian/Ubuntu:

apt-get install libfuse2 fuse-utils libfuse-dev

(Optional: run sudo chmod 777 /etc/fuse.conf)

Usage

1. Create a folder for your mount point e.g. mkdir /home/john/azure_folder

2. Navigate to azurefs folder you cloned from this repo

3. Run python azurefs.py <MOUNT_POINT> <YOUR_STORAGE_ACCOUNT> <STORAGE_SECRET_KEY>

4. Do not shutdown this process, in some other tab, navigate to your mount point e.g. azure_folder.

5. To try something out, create a container by mkdir mycontainer, and create a file e.g. date >> date.txt.

6. You are ready to go. When you're done, simply hit Ctrl-C to unmount.

Tutorial

Here's a neat blog post explains the project, highly recommended read:

http://ahmetalpbalkan.com/blog/introducing-azurefs/

Current significant limitations

• Single-level file hierarchy (i.e. /container/file)
  • Nested directories (i.e /container/directory/file) are not supported.
• Untested Mac OS X support (probably won't work)
• No support for files on root level (container name is $root)
• Freezes GUI environments e.g. standard Ubuntu; works fine on Ubuntu Server
• Couldn't make use of delete container REST API call due to UNIX VFS interface. Therefore if you attempt to rm -rf a container with 1000s of files, you'll wait a lot. Instead, do it programmatically.

Licensing

AzureFS, copyright 2012 Ahmet Alp Balkan. Licensed under Apache License Version 2.0, see http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0.html

This project is neither affiliated with Windows Azure(TM) nor supported by Microsoft Corporation (C). Use it at your own risk.

Dependency Licenses

Azure SDK for Python, copyright Microsoft Corporation (C). Licensed under Apache License Version 2.0 Project available on https://github.com/WindowsAzure/azure-sdk-for-python

fusepy, licensed under New BSD License. Project available on https://github.com/terencehonles/fusepy

Author(s)

Ahmet Alp Balkan 'ahmetalpbalkan at gmail.com'