Azure storage explorer by MSP360™ comes in two versions: Freeware and PRO. Freeware version. Freeware Azure Blob Storage explorer allows tracking, analyzing and debugging your usage of storage. It also comes with full support for Microsoft Azure Storage Analytics. Microsoft Azure Storage Explorer (Preview) is a standalone tool to easily work with your Azure Storage Accounts. This preview release enables you to easily work with Blob Storage: create and delete containers; upload, download, and delete blobs, and search across all your containers and your blobs.

Microsoft Azure Storage Explorer is a standalone app from Microsoft that allows you to easily work with Azure Storage data on Windows, macOS and Linux. Since storageexplorer uses dotnet core 2.2, this PKGBUILD should be updated to use dotnet-runtime-2.2 package. Also, with this dotnet update we do not need to set DOTNETROOT anymore since it was moved to the default location.

Microsoft Azure Storage Explorer is a widely used tool by all Azure cloud administrators. However, with the increasing number of Linux VMs in the Azure Cloud, having a working version of Azure Storage Explorer on a Linux machine became a necessity, and Microsoft did took the 1st steps into providing one.

Though, it wasn’t very easy to figure out how this works..

After many trials, I’ve managed to put together the instructions below, which will allow you to have your Azure Storage Explorer running on Linux.

Prerequisites

• A Ubuntu machine (I opted for an Azure deployed one; see instructions here)
• A desktop environment (GUI) running on the Linux machine. I went for MATE-Desktop due to it’s easy to use, stability and also personal preference. You may choose differently, of course.
• A way to connect to the GUI of your VM. We will do this via xRDP, just for the sake of demoing this(see note below).
• The .NET libraries for the Linux box, needed by Azure Storage Explorer

NOTE:

xRDP is not a secure mean of connecting to the Linux VM, as it doesn’t allow for SSH Keys. You can, however, tunnel your connection and use a SSH Key authentication for that. A nice how-to is available here.

So, while I will explain using the insecure method, I strongly recommend you to never expose your VMs to internet with just a password protected account, or, if you do that, make sure you do have a uncommon account name and a very strong password.

Of course, you can use your own on premises Linux Box, or a local VM, or some other Cloud provider; this is all up to you.

Considering that, let’s start:

Install Desktop Environment

To install Xfce, please use the following commands:

Installing Xrdp

xRDP package is available in the default Ubuntu repositories. To install it, run:

When the installation process is complete, the xRDP service will automatically start. You can verify that xRDP is running by typing:

By default xRDP uses the /etc/ssl/private/ssl-cert-snakeoil.key file which is readable only by users that are members of the “ssl-cert” group. Execute the following command to add the xrdp user to the group:

That’s it. xRDP has been installed on your Ubuntu server.

Configuring xRDP

xRDP configuration files are located in the /etc/xrdp directory. For basic xRDP connections, you only need to configure xRDP to use Xfce.

To do so open the following file in your text editor:

Add the following line at the end of the file:

Save the file and restart the Xrdp service:

Add a NSG rule in Azure portal for the 3389 port and allow the same port in ufw:

And, in the VM terminal:

Install the storage explorer

NOTE:

If you install this in XFCE, there’s a confirmed bug in XFCE when running programs installed through snap, preventing the programs to start:

To easily prevent the bug from happening, just install the keyring package:

At this point, you can continue with the rest of the steps below.

Storage Explorer Github

Snaps can be used on all major Linux distributions, including Ubuntu, Linux Mint, Debian and Fedora.

Snap is pre-installed and ready to go on the following:

• Any recent Ubuntu release:
• Ubuntu 16.04.4 LTS (Xenial Xerus) or later, including Ubuntu 18.04 LTS (Bionic Beaver), Ubuntu 18.10 (Cosmic Cuttlefish), Ubuntu 19.04 (Disco Dingo) and Ubuntu 19.10 (Eoan Ermine)
• Most recognised Ubuntu flavours built on one of the above Ubuntu releases (an exception is Lubuntu, see below)
• Solus 3 and above

If you’re using a desktop, a great first step is to install the Snap Store app.

Storage Explorer was added to the snap store, therefore you can install it by simply:

The result will look like:

Storage Explorer requires the use of a password manager, which may need to be connected manually before Storage Explorer will work correctly. You can connect Storage Explorer to your system’s password manager with the following command:

At this point you can simply open the Storage Explorer on you Linux box:

NOTE:

One issue I encountered here was that Storage Explorer was unresponsive after I logged in, until I rebooted the Linux box.

After the reboot, there were no problems noticed.

Locate Storage Explorer Shortcut:

Login to Storage Explorer:

View your subscriptions and files:

Install .NET

Check installed version with:

Azure Storage Explorer Docs

Azure Storage Explorer Installation

Install required dependency for Azure Storage Explorer:

Connect to the VM via RDP with your default username (must be configured with password). Open a browser and download Azure Storage Explorer binaries from: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-au/features/storage-explorer/ Be sure to select Linux from the drop-down. The file will be saved by default in your /home/username/Downloads directory, where “username” will correspond to your actual username.

Downloading the Azure Storage Explore:

Go back to the SSH terminal and paste the following (as a block of text):

Create Storage Explorer Ubunutu/KDE Desktop Resource (paste again as a block of text):

Reboot the VM:

Back to the xrdp session, start the Azure Storage Explorer.

If the Azure Storage Explorer doesn’t show up on Desktop, you’ll find the startup link under Menu -> Programming. You can further create a Desktop shortcut.

NOTES: If prompted, anywhere during the above steps to create a keyring password, make sure you use one that you’ll remember (you can use the same password as for the username you are logged in with, eventually).

Open Azure Storage Explorer and connect with your account.

Patching Storage Explorer for newer versions of .NET Core If you have a version of .NET Core greater than 2.0 installed and are running Storage Explorer version 1.7.0 or older, you will most likely need to patch Storage Explorer by completing the following steps:

Download version 1.5.43 of StreamJsonRpc from https://www.nuget.org/packages/StreamJsonRpc/1.5.43 via browser on the Linux machine. Look for the “Download package” link on the right hand side of the page. After downloading the package, change its file extension from .nupkg to .zip and unzip it:

Copy StreamJsonRpc.dll to the following locations inside the Storage Explorer folder:

Reboot the VM before trying to start Azure Storage explorer again.

Enjoy!

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