Access your teaching qualifications - Azure Storage

We've implemented a feature in AYTQ that allows users to upload evidence in order to request a change to their name or date of birth on the Teacher Record Service.

We store evidence uploads in Azure Storage. Each environment has a storage account set up for it:

Environment	Storage account name
Test	s165d01aytqevidencets
Preprod	s165d01aytqevidencepp
Production	s165p01aytqevidencepd

These can be viewed in the Azure Portal. Each storage account has a container called 'uploads' which contains the evidence files uploaded by users.

We use ActiveStorage to read/write to these containers. In production ActiveStorage is configured to use the microsoft service. See:

config/storage.yml
config/environments/production.rb

These are the environment variables that need to be set in order to access an Azure storage account:

AZURE_STORAGE_ACCOUNT_NAME
AZURE_STORAGE_ACCESS_KEY
AZURE_STORAGE_CONTAINER

Local development

In the development and test Rails environments, ActiveStorage is configured by default to use the local and test services, respectively. These both write to disk. See storage.yml for directory paths.

Manual testing

To test uploads to Azure in your local dev environment, do the following:

• In development.rb, change config.active_storage.service = :local to :microsoft
• In .env.development.local, set the following environment variables:

  AZURE_STORAGE_ACCOUNT_NAME=s165d01aytqevidencedv
  AZURE_STORAGE_ACCESS_KEY={retrieve from Azure Portal}
  AZURE_STORAGE_CONTAINER=uploads
  

• Restart your server
• Carry out a file upload, eg - by completing the name change form on the account page