Azurite is Microsoft’s official Azure Storage local emulator. It implements the full Azure Storage API, so you can use the official Azure SDKs to programmatically interact with it. When developing apps that need to interact with Azure Storage, you’ll want to test locally first before interacting with live data. Follow this guide to launch your own local instance of Azurite.

Prerequisites

• Docker
• Azurite Storage Explorer

Setup

Copy the following docker-compose.yml:

services:
  azurite:
    image: mcr.microsoft.com/azure-storage/azurite
    restart: unless-stopped
    environment:
      AZURITE_ACCOUNT_NAME: ${AZURITE_ACCOUNT_NAME}
      AZURITE_ACCOUNT_KEY: ${AZURITE_ACCOUNT_KEY}
      AZURITE_CONTAINER_BLOB_URL: ${AZURITE_CONTAINER_BLOB_URL}
      AZURITE_ACCOUNTS: ${AZURITE_ACCOUNTS}
      MODE: ${MODE}
    ports:
      - "10000-10002:10000-10002"
    volumes:
      - ./azurite:/data

Use the following environment variables in your .envrc:

# These only work for local emulation and are safe to commit
export AZURITE_ACCOUNT_NAME="devstoreaccount1"
export AZURITE_ACCOUNT_KEY="Eby8vdM02xNOcqFlqUwJPLlmEtlCDXJ1OUzFT50uSRZ6IFsuFq2UVErCz4I6tq/K1SZFPTOtr/KBHBeksoGMGw==" #gitleaks:allow
export AZURITE_CONTAINER_BLOB_URL="http://localhost:10000/${AZURITE_ACCOUNT_NAME}"
export AZURITE_ACCOUNTS="${AZURITE_ACCOUNT_NAME}:${AZURITE_ACCOUNT_KEY}"

Spin up the Azurite instance:

docker compose up --detach

Open Azure Storage Explorer. In the Explorer sidebar, right click on Storage Accounts and click “Connect to Azure Storage…”. This will bring up the connection wizard. At the “Select Resource” step, select “Local storage emulator”. At the “Enter Connection Info” step, the default values should already be entered, including the account name and account key. Only change “Display name” to a user-friendly value, and make sure “Use HTTPS” is unchecked. At the “Summary” step click on “Connect”. The local storage emulator should now show up in the main GUI Explorer.

Under your local storage account, you should see entries for Blob Containers, Queues, and Tables. Right click on Blob Containers, then select “Create Blob Container”. For simplicity, use the same name that you will be using for the blob container in production.

You should now see the blob container in the Explorer. You can now interact with the blob container to perform actions such as directly uploading/downloading files.

In order to programmatically connect to your local blob container, here is a minimum working example using the Azure SDK for Python:

from azure.storage.blob import BlobServiceClient
from where_you_store_your_envs import AZURITE_ACCOUNT_KEY, AZURITE_ACCOUNT_NAME

account_url = f"http://localhost:10000/{AZURITE_ACCOUNT_NAME}"
blob_service_client = BlobServiceClient(account_url, credential=AZURITE_ACCOUNT_KEY)
container_name = "your-container-name"
client = blob_service_client.get_container_client(container_name)

# `client` is the blob container client
# You can now interact with the blob container and perform actions
# such as client.list_blobs() etc.
client.list_blobs()

To translate this into prod, simply replace account_url and container_name with the appropriate values, and replace AZURITE_ACCOUNT_KEY with the storage account key, which you can get via the Azure portal or through the az CLI.