DEPRECATION NOTICE

Please note this driver is no longer supported and will not be maintained moving forwards. We recommend users use CloudStor for Docker native solutions..

Docker Volume Driver for Azure File Storage

This is a Docker Volume Driver which uses Azure Storage File Storage to mount file shares on the cloud to Docker containers as volumes. It uses network file sharing (SMB/CIFS protocols) capabilities of Azure File Storage.

Why?

• You can create Docker containers that can migrate from one host to another seamlessly.
• You can share volumes among multiple containers running on different hosts.

Usage

Before deploying this plugin, please read articles:

• Deciding when to use Azure Blobs, Azure Files, or Azure Data Disks
• Features Not Supported by the Azure File Service

and be aware of the limitations and what kind of applications are suitable for storing data on Azure File Service.

Installation

Please check out the following documentation:

• Install on Ubuntu 14.04 or lower (upstart)
• Install on Ubuntu 15.04 or higher (systemd)

Start volume driver daemon

• Make sure you have a Storage Account on Azure (using Azure CLI or Portal).
• The server process must be running on the host machine where Docker engine is installed on at all times for volumes to work properly.
• “cifs-utils” package must be installed on the host system as Azure Files use SMB protocol. For Debian/Ubuntu, run the following command on your host:

$ sudo apt-get install -y cifs-utils

Please refer to “Installation” section above. If you like to build the binary from source, see “Building” section below on how to compile. Once the driver is installed, start it and check its status.

NOTE: Storage account must be in the same region as virtual machine. Otherwise you will get an error like “Host is down”.

Ideally you would want to run it on top of an init system (such as supervisord, systemd, runit) that would start it automatically and keep it running in case of reboots and crashes.

Create volumes and containers

Starting from Docker 1.9+ you can create volumes and containers as follows:

$ docker volume create --name my_volume -d azurefile -o share=myshare
$ docker run -i -t -v my_volume:/data busybox

or simply:

$ docker run -it -v $(docker volume create -d azurefile -o share=myshare):/data busybox

This will create an Azure File Share named myshare (if it does not exist) and start a Docker container in which you can use /data directory to directly read/write from cloud file share location using SMB protocol.

You can specify additional volume options to customize the owner, group, and permissions for files and directories. See the mount.cifs(8) man page more details on these options.

Mount Options Available:

• uid
• gid
• filemode
• dirmode
• nolock
• remotepath

$ docker volume create -d azurefile \
  -o share=sharename \
  -o uid=999 \
  -o gid=999 \
  -o filemode=0600 \
  -o dirmode=0755 \
  -o nolock=true \
  -o remotepath=directory

Demo

Changelog

# 0.5.1 (2016-09-16)
- Bugfix: "bad UNC" error for remotepath (#63)

# 0.5.0 (2016-08-19)
- Added volume option 'remotepath' (#46)
- Upgraded plugin protocol for docker 1.12.0 (#57)
- Fixed stale version string in --help (#58)

# 0.4.1 (2016-08-02)
- Bugfix: wrong mount path was passed to mount command (#47, #48)

# 0.4.0 (2016-07-28)
- Added support for foreign Azure clouds (#43, #41)

# 0.3.0 (2016-07-27)
- Fixed systemd unit dependencies (#29)
- Added options for uid, gid, filemode, dirmode, nolock (#44)
- Documentation fixes (#39)

# 0.2.1 (2016-03-10)
- Start unix socket under docker group instead of root.

# 0.2 (2016-03-01)
- Added upstart init script and installation instructions.
- Bugfix: Empty response for docker volume ls (#20)
- Bugfix: Prevent leaking volume metadata (#19)
- Bugfix: Proper mountpoint removal in duplicate mounts (#23)

# 0.1 (2016-02-08)
- Initial release.

Building

If you need to use this project, please consider downloading it from “Releases” link above. The following instructions are for compiling the project from source.

In order to compile this program, you need to have Go 1.6:

$ git clone https://github.com/Azure/azurefile-dockervolumedriver src/azurefile
$ export GOPATH=`pwd`
$ cd src/azurefile
$ go build
$ ./azurefile -h

Once you have the binary compiled you can start it as follows:

$ sudo ./azurefile \
  --account-name <AzureStorageAccount> \
  --account-key  <AzureStorageAccountKey> &

However you’re recommended to use an init system to start this process after docker engine and have it restarted between reboots and crashes. Please refer to “Installation” section for more info.

Author

• Ahmet Alp Balkan

License

Copyright 2016 Microsoft Corporation

Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the "License");
you may not use this file except in compliance with the License.
You may obtain a copy of the License at

http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0

Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software
distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS,
WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied.
See the License for the specific language governing permissions and
limitations under the License.

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This project has adopted the Microsoft Open Source Code of Conduct. For more information see the Code of Conduct FAQ or contact opencode@microsoft.com with any additional questions or comments.