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Version: 0.16.16

How to set up Great Expectations to work with data in Azure Blob Storage

This guide will walk you through best practices for creating your GX Python environment and demonstrate how to locally install Great Expectations along with the necessary dependencies for working with data stored in Azure Blob Storage.

Prerequisites​

Steps​

1. Check your Python version​

You can check your version of Python by running:

Terminal command 
python --version

GX currently supports Python versions 3.7 to 3.10

executing python commands with python or python3

Depending on your installation and configuration of Python 3, you may find that executing Python commands from the terminal by calling python doesn't work as desired. If a command using python does not work, try using python3.

Instead of:

Terminal command 
python --version

Try:

Terminal command 
python3 --version

If this produces the desired result, simply replace python with python3 in our example terminal commands.

If this does not work, you may need to look into your Python 3 installation or configuration.

2. Create a Python virtual environment​

As a best practice, we recommend using a virtual environment to partition your GX installation from any other Python projects that may exist on the same system. This ensures that there will not be dependency conflicts between the GX installation and other Python projects.

Once we have confirmed that Python 3 is installed locally, we can create a virtual environment with venv.

Why use venv?

We have chosen to use venv for virtual environments in this guide because it is included with Python 3. You are not limited to using venv, and can just as easily install Great Expectations into virtual environments with tools such as virtualenv, pyenv, etc.

We will create our virtual environment by running:

Terminal command 
python -m venv my_venv

This command will create a new directory called my_venv. Our virtual environment will be located in this directory.

In order to activate the virtual environment we will run:

Terminal command 
source my_venv/bin/activate
Why name it my_venv?

You can name your virtual environment anything you like. Simply replace my_venv in the examples above with the name that you would like to use.

3. Install GX with optional dependencies for Azure Blob Storage​

To install Great Expectations with the optional dependencies needed to work with Azure Blob Storage we execute the following pip command from the terminal:

Terminal input
python -m pip install 'great_expectations[azure]'

4. Verify that GX has been installed correctly​

You can verify that GX installed successfully with the CLI command:

Terminal input
great_expectations --version

The output you receive if GX was successfully installed will be:

Terminal output
great_expectations, version 0.16.15

5. Configure the config_variables.yml file with your Azure Storage credentials​

We recommend that Azure Storage credentials be stored in the config_variables.yml file, which is located in the uncommitted/ folder by default, and is not part of source control. The following lines add Azure Storage credentials under the key AZURE_STORAGE_CONNECTION_STRING. Additional options for configuring the config_variables.yml file or additional environment variables can be found here. 

AZURE_STORAGE_CONNECTION_STRING: "DefaultEndpointsProtocol=https;EndpointSuffix=core.windows.net;AccountName=<YOUR-STORAGE-ACCOUNT-NAME>;AccountKey=<YOUR-STORAGE-ACCOUNT-KEY==>"

Next steps​

To continue configuring your Data Context to use Azure Blob Storage, please see: