Create Container

The Create Container operation creates a new container under the specified account. If the container with the same name already exists, the operation fails.

The container resource includes metadata and properties for that container. It doesn't include a list of the blobs in the container.

Request

You can construct the Create Container request as shown here. We recommend that you use HTTPS. The name of your container can include only lowercase characters and needs to follow these naming rules. In the URL, replace myaccount with the name of your storage account.

Method	Request URI	HTTP version
PUT	https://myaccount.blob.core.windows.net/mycontainer?restype=container	HTTP/1.1

Emulated storage service request

When you make a request against the emulated storage service, specify the emulator hostname and Blob Storage port as 127.0.0.1:10000, followed by the emulated storage account name.

Method	Request URI	HTTP version
PUT	http://127.0.0.1:10000/devstoreaccount1/mycontainer?restype=container	HTTP/1.1

For more information, see Use the Azurite emulator for local Azure Storage development.

URI parameters

You can specify the following additional parameters on the request URI.

Parameter	Description
timeout	Optional. The timeout parameter is expressed in seconds. For more information, see Set time-outs for Blob Storage operations.

Request headers

The required and optional request headers are described in the following table:

Request header	Description
Authorization	Required. Specifies the authorization scheme, account name, and signature. For more information, see Authorize requests to Azure Storage.
Date or x-ms-date	Required. Specifies the Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) time for the request. For more information, see Authorize requests to Azure Storage.
x-ms-version	Required for all authorized requests. Specifies the version of the operation to use for this request. For more information, see Versioning for the Azure Storage services.
x-ms-meta-name:value	Optional. A name-value pair to associate with the container as metadata. Note: As of version 2009-09-19, metadata names must adhere to the naming rules for C# identifiers.
x-ms-blob-public-access	Optional. Specifies whether data in the container can be accessed publicly and the level of access. Possible values include: - container: Specifies full public read access for container and blob data. Clients can enumerate blobs within the container via anonymous request, but they can't enumerate containers within the storage account. - blob: Specifies public read access for blobs. Blob data within this container can be read via anonymous request, but container data isn't available. Clients can't enumerate blobs within the container via anonymous request. If this header isn't included in the request, container data is private to the account owner.
x-ms-client-request-id	Optional. Provides a client-generated, opaque value with a 1-kibibyte (KiB) character limit that's recorded in the logs when logging is configured. We highly recommend that you use this header to correlate client-side activities with requests that the server receives. For more information, see Monitor Azure Blob Storage.

Request headers (encryption scopes)

As of version 2019-02-02, you can specify the following headers on a request to set a default encryption scope on a container. If you set an encryption scope, it is automatically used to encrypt all blobs that are uploaded to the container.

Request header	Description
x-ms-default-encryption-scope	Required. The encryption scope to set as the default on the container.
x-ms-deny-encryption-scope-override	Required. Values are true or false. Setting this header to true ensures that every blob that's uploaded to this container uses the default encryption scope. When this header is false, a client can upload a blob with an encryption scope other than the default scope.

Request body

None.

Sample request

Request Syntax:  
PUT https://myaccount.blob.core.windows.net/mycontainer?restype=container HTTP/1.1  
  
Request Headers:  
x-ms-version: 2011-08-18  
x-ms-date: Sun, 25 Sep 2011 22:50:32 GMT  
x-ms-meta-Name: StorageSample  
Authorization: SharedKey myaccount:Z5043vY9MesKNh0PNtksNc9nbXSSqGHueE00JdjidOQ=  

Response

The response includes an HTTP status code and a set of response headers.

Status code

A successful operation returns status code 201 (Created).

For information about status codes, see Status and error codes.

Response headers

The response for this operation includes the headers that are described in the following table. The response can also include additional standard HTTP headers. All standard headers conform to the HTTP/1.1 protocol specification.

Response header	Description
ETag	The ETag for the container. If the request version is 2011-08-18 or later, the ETag value is enclosed in quotation marks.
Last-Modified	Returns the date and time when the container was last modified. The date format follows RFC 1123. For more information, see Representation of date/time values in headers. Any operation that modifies the container or its properties or metadata updates the last modified time. Operations on blobs do not affect the last modified time of the container.
x-ms-request-id	Uniquely identifies the request that was made. You can use it to troubleshoot the request. For more information, see Troubleshoot API operations
x-ms-version	Indicates the Blob Storage version that's used to execute the request. This header is returned for requests made against version 2009-09-19 or later.
Date	The UTC date/time value generated by the service, which indicates the time at which the response was initiated.
x-ms-client-request-id	Can be used to troubleshoot requests and corresponding responses. The value of this header is equal to the value of the x-ms-client-request-id header if it is present in the request, and the value contains no more than 1024 visible ASCII characters. If the x-ms-client-request-id header isn't present in the request, the header won't be present in the response.

Response body

None.

Sample response

Response status:  
HTTP/1.1 201 Created  
  
Response headers:  
Transfer-Encoding: chunked  
Date: Sun, 25 Sep 2011 23:00:12 GMT  
ETag: “0x8CB14C3E29B7E82”  
Last-Modified: Sun, 25 Sep 2011 23:00:06 GMT  
x-ms-version: 2011-08-18  
Server: Windows-Azure-Blob/1.0 Microsoft-HTTPAPI/2.0  

Authorization

Authorization is required when calling any data access operation in Azure Storage. You can authorize the Create Container operation as described below.

Important

Microsoft recommends using Microsoft Entra ID with managed identities to authorize requests to Azure Storage. Microsoft Entra ID provides superior security and ease of use compared to Shared Key authorization.

Microsoft Entra ID (recommended)

Azure Storage supports using Microsoft Entra ID to authorize requests to blob data. With Microsoft Entra ID, you can use Azure role-based access control (Azure RBAC) to grant permissions to a security principal. The security principal may be a user, group, application service principal, or Azure managed identity. The security principal is authenticated by Microsoft Entra ID to return an OAuth 2.0 token. The token can then be used to authorize a request against the Blob service.

To learn more about authorization using Microsoft Entra ID, see Authorize access to blobs using Microsoft Entra ID.

Permissions

Listed below are the RBAC action necessary for a Microsoft Entra user, group, managed identity, or service principal to call the Create Container operation, and the least privileged built-in Azure RBAC role that includes this action:

• Azure RBAC action: Microsoft.Storage/storageAccounts/blobServices/containers/write
• Least privileged built-in role: Storage Blob Data Contributor

To learn more about assigning roles using Azure RBAC, see Assign an Azure role for access to blob data.

Shared access signatures (SAS)

A shared access signature (SAS) provides secure delegated access to resources in a storage account. With a SAS, you have granular control over how a client can access data. You can specify what resource the client may access, what permissions they have to those resources, and how long the SAS is valid.

The Create Container operation supports supports authorization using an account SAS.

When Shared Key access is disallowed for the storage account, an account SAS token will not be permitted on a request to Blob Storage. To learn more, see Understand how disallowing Shared Key affects SAS tokens.

Account SAS

An account SAS is secured with the storage account key. An account SAS delegates access to resources in one or more of the storage services. All of the operations available via a service or user delegation SAS are also available via an account SAS.

The following table indicates the signed resource type and signed permissions to specify when delegating access:

Operation	Signed service	Signed resource type	Signed permission
Create Container	Blob (b)	Container (c)	Create (c) or Write (w)

To learn more about the account SAS, see Create an account SAS.

Shared key

The Create Container operation supports Shared Key authorization. Authorizing with account keys is not recommended for most scenarios, as it's less secure.

Microsoft recommends disallowing Shared Key authorization for the storage account when possible. For more information, see Prevent authorization with Shared Key.

Remarks

Containers are created immediately within the storage account. It isn't possible to nest one container within another.

You can optionally create a default or root container for your storage account. The root container makes it possible to reference a blob from the top level of the storage account hierarchy, without referencing the container name.

To add the root container to your storage account, create a container named $root. Construct the request as follows:

Request Syntax:  
PUT https://myaccount.blob.core.windows.net/$root?restype=container HTTP/1.1  
  
Request Headers:  
x-ms-version: 2011-08-18  
x-ms-date: Sun, 25 Sep 2011 22:50:32 GMT  
x-ms-meta-Name: StorageSample  
Authorization: SharedKey myaccount:Z5043vY9MesKNh0PNtksNc9nbXSSqGHueE00JdjidOQ=  

You can specify metadata for a container when you're creating it by including one or more metadata headers on the request. The format for the metadata header is x-ms-meta-name:value.

If a container by the same name is being deleted when Create Container is called, the server returns status code 409 (Conflict), and it provides additional error information that indicates that the container is being deleted.

Billing

Pricing requests can originate from clients that use Blob Storage APIs, either directly through the Blob Storage REST API, or from an Azure Storage client library. These requests accrue charges per transaction. The type of transaction affects how the account is charged. For example, read transactions accrue to a different billing category than write transactions. The following table shows the billing category for Create Container requests based on the storage account type:

Operation	Storage account type	Billing category
Create Container	Premium block blob Standard general-purpose v2 Standard general-purpose v1	List and Create Container operations

To learn about pricing for the specified billing category, see Azure Blob Storage Pricing.

See also

Authorize requests to Azure Storage
Status and error codes
Blob Storage error codes
Name and reference containers, blobs, and metadata
Set and retrieve properties and metadata for blob resources
Set Container ACL