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Using Azure Storage with Postman

Azure Storage provides a REST API that allows you to interact with it from any device with an internet connection, regardless of what language you are programming in.

See the full details in the Azure Storage REST API Reference docs.

When I am learning/investigating a new API the first thing I do is exercise it with Postman. Postman is a GUI tool that allows you to manually create an test REST services, and as a bonus you can export sample code many popular languages. You can Download Postman here.

NOTE: I am going to assume you know how to use Postman. If you need a refresher the Postman website has a good Learning Center.

How to use this sample

Setup

  • First you will need to import the Postman collection into the tool. You can download it here.

  • In the Postman collection you will see 5 requests. They are numbered so that you can execute them in the correct order.

    5 requests

  • Now that we have our collection, we need to setup some variables. I created an environment in Postman to hold them all.

    variables

    • directoryId - The ID of the AAD instance you plan to authenticate against
    • client_id - The ID of the AAD object (in our case a service principal) that you are going to authenticate with
    • client_secret - This string is the "password" for our service principal
    • subscriptionId - The ID of the subscription we are going to use
    • resourceGroupName - This is the resource group we want to put our storage account in
    • accountName - This is the name of the storage account we will create and use
    • containerName - This is the name of the blob container we will create and use
    • blob_name - This is the name of the blob we will create

  • Now lets create our service principal.

  • Now would also be a good time to update the rest of the Postman variables.

    • Grab your subscription id.
    • Create the resource group you want to use.
    • Fill in values for the storage account, container and blob names. Don't create these in Azure, this is what our Postman sample will do.

Request Details

NOTE: Here I am walking through the configuration of each request. If you imported the Postman collection during the setup you will have this all configured already for you. However, it is good to step through it, to understand what it is doing.

  • 01 GET Management OAuth2 token

    The first thing we want to do is create our storage account. This is done by making a request to the Azure resource manager directly. To that end we need to get an authorization token against the management plane in Azure.

    We get the token by making a GET request to https://login.microsoftonline.com/{{directoryId}}/oauth2/token. We want to set the Content-Type header to application/x-www-form-urlencoded, and pass in the following key value pares in the body.

    Key Value
    grant_type client_credentials
    client_id {{client_id}}
    client_secret {{client_secret}}
    resource https://management.azure.com

    Finally we want to use a bit of code to parse the response and pull the access token we generated into a variable we can use later.

    var data = JSON.parse(responseBody);
postman.setGlobalVariable("mgmt_access_token", data.access_token);

    Now we can send this request to Azure and get back our auth token for the management plane.

  • 02 PUT create storage account

    Now with the proper token, we can ask Azure to create our storage account.

    We do that by making a PUT request to https://management.azure.com/subscriptions/{{subscriptionId}}/resourceGroups/{{resourceGroupName}}/providers/Microsoft.Storage/storageAccounts/{{accountName}}. We want to set a query parm for api-version to 2018-02-01, and a header for the Content-Type to application/json. Now we want to set the Authorization to use the Bearer Token type and the token from our variable {{mgmt_access_token}}.

    Now we will need to send a chunk of json as the body telling azure the details of the storage account we want to create.

    {
  "sku": {
  "name": "Standard_GRS"
  },
  "kind": "StorageV2",
  "location": "southcentralus"
}

    When you send this request you will get back a 202 Accepted response. This tells us that Azure has started to create our storage account. If you resend the request a few seconds later you should get back a 200 OK with the full details of the storage account you just created.

  • 03 GET Storage OAuth2 token

    In the first step we authenticated against the Azure management plane, to talk to Azure storage we will need to authenticate against the storage management plane. It has a different "scope". So you will see that this request looks just like the first one, except for the resource key is set to https://storage.azure.com and we are putting the returned access token in a different Postman variable.

  • 04 PUT create container

    Now lets create a container to put our blob in. We do this by sending a PUT request to https://{{accountName}}.blob.core.windows.net/{{containerName}}, with a query string parameter restype set to container, and set the following key value pairs as headers.

    Key Value
    Content-Type application/json
    x-ms-version 2019-07-07
    x-ms-blob-public-access container

    Now we want to set the Authorization to use the Bearer Token type and the token from our variable {{storage_access_token}}.

    Now, when you send the request you should get back a 201 created

  • 05 PUT a blob in the container

    Finally, lets upload a blob to the container we just created. We do this by sending a PUT request to https://{{accountName}}.blob.core.windows.net/{{containerName}}/{{blob_name}}. As before we set the Authorization to use the Bearer Token type and the token from our variable {{storage_access_token}}. We also set headers for x-ms-blob-type of BlockBlob and x-ms-version of 2019-07-07. Finally, we can place whatever we want in the body, this will be the contents of our file. NOTE: There are limits to the size of the blob you can upload in a single request, if your blob is too big you will have to break it into chunks.

That is it, you should now have a storage account, container and blob in Azure. We just scratched the surface of what these APIs can do, but this should help you get started.

done

Reference Links