Azure Storage Blob SDK Uploads Only 250MB

[brt5586]

Issue when uploading to a storage blob, 250MB is the hard limit - this is easy to reproduce - currently got NGINX as the frontend proxy, postgres as docker container and same with pwpusher on Ubuntu 22.04 on Azure VM.

The issue: When uploading to storage blob, you will notice in console '413' error response indicating the file size is too large. Looking further into this and it's to do with the SAS service version: (outlined here: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/rest/api/storageservices/put-blob?tabs=azure-ad#remarks)

https://REDACTED.blob.core.windows.net/REDACTED/randomfile?sp=rw&sv=2018-11-09&se=2023-06-28T10%3A00%3A50Z&sr=REDACTED

As seen above it's requested the 2018-11-09 service version which is 250MB limit, since then it's now been upped 5GB with newer service versions.

I'm using the latest version of pwpusher, please can you change this?

[github-actions[bot]]

Hello @brt5586, thanks for contributing to the Password Pusher community! We will respond as soon as possible.

[pglombardo]

Hi @brt5586 - thanks this is useful info. I'm traveling for the next couple weeks but I'll take a closer look and see if I can make the improvement once I get back.

[pglombardo]

Hi @brt5586 I previously didn't have this documented well but could you confirm that you put in the proper CORS configuration for the Azure storage? One of the CORS configurations is to allow the x-ms-blob-type header.

Updated CORS documentation for Azure is here: https://github.com/pglombardo/PasswordPusher/blob/master/Configuration.md#azure-storage-cors-configuration

[msundman78]

I'm having the same problem, being limited to uploading max 256MB files to Azure Blob Storage due to the old API version being used. According to this thread: https://github.com/Azure/azure-storage-ruby/issues/172

It should be possible to pass the following setting to force a newer version: Azure::Storage::Blob::Default::STG_VERSION = "xxxx-xx-xx"

I believe 2024-05-04 is the current version recommended to be used: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/rest/api/storageservices/versioning-for-the-azure-storage-services

Is that anything you can use from PWP?

[pglombardo]

Hi @msundman78 - that's helpful thanks. I dug in a little bit and Azure support doesn't seem to be in great shape. I'll document here for the record.

Password Pusher uses ActiveStorage to upload/store/retrieve files. This is the section on how to configure Azure storage.

It references the azure-storage-blob Ruby gem which hasn't been updated since 2021. :-(

When I go to the source code for that gem, it's been deprecated by Microsoft with no clear alternative.

This is the discussion in the Rails community: https://github.com/rails/rails/issues/49983

@msundman78 you might be able to manually set that value. You could create a file config/initializers/azure.rb with the following content:

require "azure-storage-ruby"
Azure::Storage::Blob::Default::STG_VERSION = "2024-05-04"

[msundman78]

Thanks @pglombardo. After some more digging I found that ActiveStorage is using SAS tokens for DirectUpload, which does not use the x-ms-version header for selecting the API version. Instead the API version is selected when generating the SAS URL in the SignedVersion (sv) parameter, or the optional api-version parameter [1].

The SignedVersion parameter is also defined in the STG_VERSION constant but in the Common module instead of the Blob module.

I also found that in API version 2020-12-06 and higher the Signature format was changed slightly making them incompatible with the current azure-storage-blob implementation [2]. However, all API versions since 2019-12-12 support 5 GB single PUT uploads [3].

Below code in config/initializers/azure.rb using the latest supported API version solves the problem (Tested with a 3GB upload):

require "azure/storage/blob"
module Azure::Storage::Common::Default
  remove_const(:STG_VERSION) if const_defined?(:STG_VERSION)
  const_set(:STG_VERSION, "2020-10-02")
end

[1] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/rest/api/storageservices/versioning-for-the-azure-storage-services#authorize-requests-by-using-a-shared-access-signature [2] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/rest/api/storageservices/create-service-sas#version-2020-12-06-and-later [3] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/rest/api/storageservices/put-blob?tabs=microsoft-entra-id#remarks

[pglombardo]

@msundman78 - that is an excellent investigation and solution! You should also post this in https://github.com/rails/rails/issues/49983 for others in the Rails community that are facing this.

For anyone else reading this thread and using Azure as a backend, could you confirm that the fix above works for you? If so, I'll roll this initializer into the main code base.

Thanks @msundman78!

[msundman78]

@pglombardo, Have you merged the above change, or are you still waiting for more people to comment?

I also wonder how ActiveStorage decision to drop support for azure-storage-blob will affect Azure Blob support in pwpush? https://github.com/rails/rails/pull/52863

If I understand this blogg right, it should be able to switch to Active Storage adapter to use the new azure-blob gem instead: https://testdouble.com/insights/azure-blob-a-new-ruby-gem-for-azure-blob-storage

[pglombardo]

No... this issue just got lost in the noise and I haven't been back with all the other things happening.

That is a great find. I'll be upgrading the app to Rails 8 soon - when I do I'll switch over to that new azure-blob gem.