How to Install AzCopy for Azure Storage

AzCopy is a command-line tool to manage and copy blobs or files to or from a storage account. It also allows you to sync storage accounts and move files from Amazon S3 to Azure storage. In this blog post, I will cover how to install AzCopy on Windows, Linux, macOS, or in update the version in the Azure Cloud Shell.

AzCopy v10 is now generally available to all of our customers and provides higher throughput and more efficient data movement compared to the earlier version of AzCopy (v8). Version 10 also adds additional functionality like sync of blob storage accounts and much more.

Install AzCopy

You can get the latest version of AzCopy from here: Get started with AzCopy

• Windows (zip)
• Linux (tar)
• MacOS (zip)

Install AzCopy on Windows

To install AzCopy on Windows, you can run the following PowerShell script, or you can download the zip file and run it from where ever you want. This script will add the AzCopy folder location to your system path so that you can run the AzCopy command from anywhere.

#Download AzCopy
Invoke-WebRequest -Uri "https://aka.ms/downloadazcopy-v10-windows" -OutFile AzCopy.zip -UseBasicParsing

#Curl.exe option (Windows 10 Spring 2018 Update (or later))
curl.exe -L -o AzCopy.zip https://aka.ms/downloadazcopy-v10-windows

#Expand Archive
Expand-Archive ./AzCopy.zip ./AzCopy -Force

#Move AzCopy to the destination you want to store it
Get-ChildItem ./AzCopy/*/azcopy.exe | Move-Item -Destination "C:\Users\thmaure\AzCopy\AzCopy.exe"

#Add your AzCopy path to the Windows environment PATH (C:\Users\thmaure\AzCopy in this example), e.g., using PowerShell:
$userenv = [System.Environment]::GetEnvironmentVariable("Path", "User")
[System.Environment]::SetEnvironmentVariable("PATH", $userenv + ";C:\Users\thmaure\AzCopy", "User")

Install AzCopy on Linux

To install AzCopy on Linux, you can run the following shell script, or you can download the tar file and run it from where ever you want. This script will put the AzCopy executable into the /usr/bin folder so that you can run it from anywhere.

#Download AzCopy
wget https://aka.ms/downloadazcopy-v10-linux

#Expand Archive
tar -xvf downloadazcopy-v10-linux

#(Optional) Remove existing AzCopy version
sudo rm /usr/bin/azcopy

#Move AzCopy to the destination you want to store it
sudo cp ./azcopy_linux_amd64_*/azcopy /usr/bin/

Authorize with Azure Storage

When you start working with Azure Storage, you have two options to authorize against the Azure Storage. You can provide authorization credentials by using Azure Active Directory (AD), or by using a Shared Access Signature (SAS) token.

It also depends on which services you want to use.

Authenticate using Azure AD

To authenticate with AzCopy using Azure AD, you can use the following command

azcopy login

Authenticate using SAS token

To authenticate with AzCopy using a SAS token you can use this command as an example

azcopy cp "C:\local\path" "https://account.blob.core.windows.net/mycontainer1/?sv=2018-03-28&ss=bjqt&srt=sco&sp=rwddgcup&se=2019-05-01T05:01:17Z&st=2019-04-30T21:01:17Z&spr=https&sig=MGCXiyEzbtttkr3ewJIh2AR8KrghSy1DGM9ovN734bQF4%3D" --recursive=true

To make things easier you can use Azure PowerShell to generate the SAS token for you. I wrote a blog post on ITOPSTALK.com about how you can do that. You can get the SAS token using the following Azure PowerShell command. If you are running Linux or macOS, you can find on this blog post, how to install PowerShell 6.

Connect-AzAccount
Get-AzSubscription

$subscriptionId = "yourSubscriptionId"
$storageAccountRG = "demo-azcopy-rg"
$storageAccountName = "tomsaccount"
$storageContainerName = "images"
$localPath = "C:\temp\images"

Select-AzSubscription -SubscriptionId $SubscriptionId

$storageAccountKey = (Get-AzStorageAccountKey -ResourceGroupName $storageAccountRG -AccountName $storageAccountName).Value[0]

$destinationContext = New-AzStorageContext -StorageAccountName $storageAccountName -StorageAccountKey $storageAccountKey

$containerSASURI = New-AzStorageContainerSASToken -Context $destinationContext -ExpiryTime(get-date).AddSeconds(3600) -FullUri -Name $storageContainerName -Permission rw

azcopy copy $localPath $containerSASURI --recursive

To learn more about SAS tokens, check out Using shared access signatures (SAS).

I hope this helps you to install AzCopy and configure it. If you have any questions, feel free to leave a comment.