Using Blobfuse2 to access Azure Storage like a folder from Windows

Blobfuse2 is a FUSE-compatible driver that allows you to mount Azure Blob storage containers as drives on Linux and Windows. Blobfuse2 uses the libfuse open source library to communicate with the Linux FUSE kernel module, and provides a virtual file system layer on top of Azure Storage. Blobfuse2 support:

• block blobs
• append blobs

And allows you to perform basic file operations such as read, write, rename, delete, etc. Blobfuse2 also supports caching and parallelism to improve performance and reliability.

Install Blobfuse2 on WSL

The most painless install is using Microsoft software repo for Linux. Ubuntu:

sudo wget https://packages.microsoft.com/config/ubuntu/20.04/packages-microsoft-prod.deb
sudo dpkg -i packages-microsoft-prod.deb
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install libfuse3-dev fuse3
sudo apt-get install blobfuse2

Create a Config

Sample config I used:

allow-other: true

logging:
  type: syslog
  level: log_err 

components:
  - libfuse
  - file_cache
  - attr_cache
  - azstorage

libfuse:
  attribute-expiration-sec: 120
  entry-expiration-sec: 120
  negative-entry-expiration-sec: 240

file_cache:
  path: /home/alg/.blobfuse2cache/alg/
  timeout-sec: 120
  max-size-mb: 4096

attr_cache:
  timeout-sec: 7200

azstorage:
  type: block
  account-name: alganalytics 
  account-key: theKey
  endpoint: https://alganalytics.blob.core.windows.net
  mode: key

Then

sudo blobfuse2 mount all ./alganalytics --config-file=./blobfuse-alg.yml

Mounting container : archived to path  alganalytics/archived
Mounting container : raw to path  alganalytics/raw
2 of 2 containers were successfully mounted

You have to run as sudo and set allow-other: true to be able to access it from Windows.

Now it’s accessible as file share, even in mc.

And in Windows Explorer.

I can drag and drop as a usual filesystem in Windows. Works like a charm.

Blobfuse2 is also opensource.

Configuration

All the configuration keys are described here.

S3

Note, there is a similar fuse driver for AWS S3.