An easy and secure way to share data with colleagues is using Azure Data Storage containers.

This is how I mount such container using bibfuse (developped by my friend Sylvain) and systemctl --user

About Azure containers

From Azure Portal, you can filter for “Storage Account”

In the following page, I will use “my_storage_account”

And from “my_storage_account”, I can get my storage key from “Access keys”

In the following page, I will use “my_storage_key”

Installation - Set-up

install dependancies

sudo apt-get install libfuse3-dev fuse3
sudo apt-get install blobfuse2
1pip install bibfuse

1: install in base

configure bibfuse

Config will be in ~/.config/bibfuse, we store that in env variable BIBFUSE_SECURE_PATH

And a passphrase of exactly 16-chars is expected, we store that in env variable BLOBFUSE2_SECURE_CONFIG_PASSPHRASE

And call bibfuse encrypt to create the config

mkdir -p ~/.config/bibfuse
export BIBFUSE_SECURE_PATH=~/.config/bibfuse
export BLOBFUSE2_SECURE_CONFIG_PASSPHRASE=anypassphrase<16

bibfuse encrypt --account my_storage_account --key my_storage_key

This creates a my_storage_account.yaml config file under ~/.config/bibfuse

And modify startup script (.bashrc, .zshrc) to export BIBFUSE_SECURE_PATH, BLOBFUSE2_SECURE_CONFIG_PASSPHRASE

Will be used by bibfuse commands

Usage

list all storage accounts

bibfuse list --accounts
> my_storage_account

mount all containers from a storage account

in ~/AZURE

bibfuse mount ~/AZURE --account my_storage_account --all

unmount all containers

should be called from ~/AZURE

cd ~/AZURE
bibfuse unmount –-all
cd -

mount a given container `container_1`

bibfuse mount ~/AZURE/container_1 --account my_storage_account --container container_1

Start this with `systemd --user`

I will use 4 files for that:

mount_azure.sh in ~/bin to mount all containers
unmount_azure.sh in ~/bin to unmount all containers
mount_azure.conf in ~/bin to store BIBFUSE_SECURE_PATH, BLOBFUSE2_SECURE_CONFIG_PASSPHRASE
bibfuse.service in ~/.config/systemd/user with the service logic

#changed filename for confidentiality reason
!cat ~/bin/mount_azure\ \(copy\).sh

#!/bin/bash
source ~/miniconda/etc/profile.d/conda.sh
source ~/bin/mount_azure.conf
export BLOBFUSE2_SECURE_CONFIG_PASSPHRASE
export BIBFUSE_SECURE_PATH
conda activate base
bibfuse mount ~/AZURE/zyoung --account my_storage_account --container container_1

!cat ~/bin/unmount_azure.sh

#!/bin/bash
cd ~/AZURE
source ~/miniconda/etc/profile.d/conda.sh
source ~/bin/mount_azure.conf
export BLOBFUSE2_SECURE_CONFIG_PASSPHRASE
export BIBFUSE_SECURE_PATH
conda activate base
bibfuse unmount --all
cd -

#changed filename for confidentiality reason
!cat ~/bin/mount_azure\ \(copy\).conf

BIBFUSE_SECURE_PATH=/home/guillaume/.config/bibfuse
BLOBFUSE2_SECURE_CONFIG_PASSPHRASE=anypassphrase<16

!cat ~/.config/systemd/user/bibfuse.service

[Unit]
Description=Mount azure storage account with bibfuse
DefaultDependencies=no
After=network.target

[Service]
Type=simple
#User=guillaume
#Group=guillaume
EnvironmentFile=/home/guillaume/bin/mount_azure.conf
ExecStart=/home/guillaume/bin/mount_azure.sh
ExecStop=/home/guillaume/bin/unmount_azure.sh
TimeoutStartSec=5
RemainAfterExit=yes

[Install]
WantedBy=default.target

setup systemd –user bibfuse.service

Activate systemd for users

loginctl enable-linger guillaume

Load bibfuse service

systemctl --user daemon-reload

Start / Stop / Status

systemctl --user start bibfuse
systemctl --user stop bibfuse
systemctl --user status bibfuse

and everything looks great, activate to start at boot time

systemctl --user enable bibfuse

monitor logs for bibfuse

Just the standard way, but using --user

journalctl –-user -f -u bibfuse

# or without -f (output appended data)
journalctl –-user -u bibfuse