Using Azure File Shares

1. Start Locally

Firstly, we need to launch Locally which we can do from a terminal by running:

Once Locally has started, the Locally Dashboard will open automatically:

2. Create a Resource Group

Next we can create the Resource Group to hold the Storage Account:

There's two things to note here:

1. The Azure CLI supports Automatic Configuration, meaning that it can automatically be configured to work against Locally just by prefixing commands with locally run.
2. Locally intentionally uses a different set of locations to Azure as a safety precaution, so that you can be confident you're deploying against Locally rather than regular Azure. You can also configure Locally to use the Azure locations too, but you'll want to be extra sure that you're prefixing commands with locally run when you do.

3. Create the Storage Account

File shares live in a Storage Account, so let's create one:

{
  "fileEndpoint": "https://samplefileshares1.file.core.storage.locally:5660/",
  "name": "samplefileshares1",
  "provisioningState": "Succeeded"
}

That file endpoint is served by the Storage Emulator running on your machine.

4. Create a file share

Now we can create a share called reports, with a 10 GiB quota:

{
  "name": "reports",
  "quota": 10,
  "type": "Microsoft.Storage/storageAccounts/fileServices/shares"
}

5. Upload a file

The az storage directory and az storage file commands need the account's connection string. Putting it in AZURE_STORAGE_CONNECTION_STRING means we don't have to pass it to each one:

Let's create a directory in the share:

{
  "created": true
}

Then create a small file and upload it into that directory:

We can confirm it's there:

Name         Size
-----------  ------
october.txt  24

6. Download and delete the file

Let's read it back out again:

october sales: 42 units

Then delete the file, and the now-empty directory:

7. Tidy up

Finally, we can tidy up. To remove just the share, and any files still in it:

Or to remove the Resource Group and everything within it:

Doing this with other tooling

Whilst this guide used the Azure CLI, the Storage Account and its file shares work the same way through any of the tooling that Locally supports - Microsoft.Storage/storageAccounts and Microsoft.Storage/storageAccounts/fileServices/shares resources in HashiCorp Terraform or OpenTofu, Pulumi, Bicep or an ARM Template all provision against Locally in the same way.

The same is true of the data plane: hand the connection string to the Azure SDK for .NET, Go or Python and your application reads and writes files against Locally.

Next steps

To write and read blobs in the same kind of account, see Storage Account. For messages rather than files, see Storage Queues.

Should you encounter any issues, please take a look at the troubleshooting section.

Resource types this guide uses

These are the Azure resource types this guide creates in Locally:

• Microsoft.Storage/storageAccounts/fileServices/shares
• Microsoft.Storage/storageAccounts