Using AZCopy with an Azure WebApp

calendar Feb 23, 2022 · 2 min read · microsoft azure app-service linux  ·
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How to copy data from a Azure Linux Web App using Microsoft’s AZCopy utility.

Why

There’s probably many reasons why you might want to do this. I was faced with a WebApp where the FTPS and Kudu file explorer were both misbehaving but the SSH console was fine. I wanted to extract the contents of the site to a storage account just-in-case before proceeding with any troubleshooting. The method below could also easily be adapted to upload files to a WebApp from a storage account if that was required.

How

For this to work we need an Azure Linux-based WebApp and a Storage Account with a Blob container ready for use.

  1. Open an SSH session on the WebApp using the Azure Portal.

  2. It’s possible to move all the individual files, but you can also create a single tar archive of the site as follows

1tar -cvf myarchive.tar /home/site
  1. Download and extract the AZCopy utility. This requires wget which (oddly) isn’t present in apps using the PHP 7.0 framework, but is on those using PHP 7.4.
1wget https://aka.ms/downloadazcopy-v10-linux -O azcopy.tar
2tar -xvf azcopy.tar
  1. Use the Azure Portal to obtain a Shared Access Signature (SAS) for the container in the storage account. To do this navigate to the Container in the portal, select the “Shared access tokens” blade. You need to set at least the “Permissions” section to allow writes, but the defaults elsewhere should work unless you need to restrict access further. Click on the Generate SAS token and URL and then copy the Blob SAS URL field from the bottom of the page for use in the next step.

Create a Shared Access Signature

  1. Use the downloaded azcopy command to copy the archive of your site to the container on the storage account (be aware the folder name may be different in your download if the current version is different, so replace the 10.13.0 bit as appropriate). Replace the URL in this command with the URL SAS copied from the Portal in the previous step.
1azcopy_linux_amd64_10.13.0/azcopy copy "./myarchive.tar" "https://mystorageaccount.blob.core.windows.net/mycontainer?THE-REST-OF-THE-SAS"
  1. Check the file is in the storage account as expected and you’re done.

Contents of container

If you would like to build a demo environment for testing this out, check out this Gist on Github which contains some sample code that can be run from CloudShell.