Setting up Azure Storage

Important: Azure Storage only needs to be set up once for the entire organization. Onboarding developers should ask their tech lead or tenured developers where to get the AZURE_STORAGE_ACCOUNT_NAME and AZURE_STORAGE_CONNECTION_STRING necessary to populate the .env file of meepanyar-node

This guide will help set up an Azure Storage account and create the necessary containers to get photo uploads to work in the backend meepanyar-node repo.

Creating an Azure Account and Storage Account

1. Log in to portal.azure.com or create an account if you don't already have one
2. Navigate to the "Storage Accounts" section at the top
3. Press "Create" on the top left to create a Storage Account.
   • You can use an existing "Resource Group" if you already have one. If not, you can create one on the page by doing "Create New"
   • Call your storage account anything. This will be the AZURE_STORAGE_ACCOUNT_NAME environment variable for meepanyar-node.
   • Pick any region.
   • "Standard" performance and any redundancy plan is fine
   • In "Advanced" make sure that "Enabled blob public access" is used. Insufficient testing at scale was done to determine if the "Hot" access tier was necessary, but "Cool" worked for developers to test on. Photos will be downloaded by Airtable, so "Cool" access tier should be fine.
   • In the "Networking" section, make sure the storage is accessible by all networks
   • "Data Protection" and "Tabs" sections can be left to default

Creating a Photos Container

1. Enter your storage account you created from following the above steps
2. Create a container by clicking on "Containers" and then the "+" sign
3. Name the container "photos" and make the "Public Access Level" of the container: "Container"

Getting the AZURE_STORAGE_CONNECTION_STRING

1. In the Storage Account you just made, click the "Access Keys" that appear on the left hand side of the Storage Account page.
2. Copy one of the "connection string"s to the AZURE_STORAGE_CONNECTION_STRING environment variable in meepanyar-node