How to enable SFTP on Azure Blob Storage

Sometimes you may need to use SFTP access to your Azure blob Storage account. Usually, there are requirements that you will have for a specific project that has limitations to use the Azure Storage Explorer.

Today i would like to explain how you can enable the SFTP in the Azure blob storage account.

Prerequisites

Before you begin please find the prerequisites that the storage account must have.

• Standard General purpose v2 or premium blob storage
• Enable Azure Data Lake Storage Gen2 Capabilities
• Enable Local Users for the SFTP.

Note that the Azure Data Lake Storage Gen2 Capabilities has its prerequisites which are the following:

• Version-level immutability support must be disabled
• Versioning on the Blob Storage must be disabled.
• Blob soft delete and Container soft delete must be disabled.

How to enable Azure Data Lake Storage Gen2 Capabilities

• Login to the Azure Portal.
• From the left side menu or the Search find out the Storage accounts.
• Select your Storage account.

• Expand the Settings and click on Data Lake Gen2 upgrade.
• Expand Step1, click on Review, and agree to changes.
• You can read for the Features that aren't supported in Data Lake Storage Gen2.
• Tick to Agree, and click Agree to changes.

• The next step is to Start the Validation.
• The Validation will check if the blob storage has features that are not supported.
• If it finds features that aren't supported the Validation will be failed, and you won't be able to continue with the upgrade.
• Click on Start Validation.
• For this scenario, I have created a new Storage Account that fills all the prerequisites and the Validation passed.

• The last step is to proceed with the storage account upgrade .

How to enable the SFTP in the Azure Storage Account

So far so good. Now we will proceed to enable the SFTP in the Azure storage account.

• From the left side menu expand the Settings of the storage account.
• Click on SFTP.
• Click on Enable SFTP.

• You will see a notification that will enable local users and has hourly billing impact. This is one of the prerequisites that I wrote in the beginning because SFTP doesn't support Entra authentication.
• Click Enable to Proceed.

• The next step is to create a local user to allow access through SFTP.
• Click on Add local user.
• Give a user name.
• Select the authentication method (SSH Password or key pair). The recommendation is to use an SSH key pair instead of a password. Click Next.

• Select the container to which you want to give access to.
• Select at least one permission that a user must have in the container
• In the Home (landing) directory you can select the directory that will be the landing directory when the user will be connected. Click Add.

• Now use an application for the SFTP access like WinSCP to test the connection.

That's it!!

I hope to learn something today for the article.

Have a nice weekend !!