Open-source BlobLens brings cheap full-text search to Azure Blob Storage
Managing Azure Storage accounts across multiple projects often creates a frustrating gap: you know a phrase exists somewhere inside a document, but there's no easy way to find which file contains it. The built-in Azure Storage Explorer and portal search only match blob names, mostly by prefix. can do full content search, but it's expensive to start with — roughly $75/month for the Basic tier and $250/month for Standard, per search service — which is hard to justify for internal tools, , or smaller deployments.
BlobLens was built to close that gap. It's a lightweight, self-hosted engine for that runs with a single up command. It combines a FastAPI backend with a built-in search UI, Meilisearch for typo-tolerant instant search, and a background indexer worker.
Point it at an Azure Storage Account using a connection string, and it indexes the actual content of PDFs, DOCX files, plain text, Markdown, source code, and more than 25 text-based formats. Results can be filtered by filename, content, container, file type, and metadata, and searches return in roughly 10 milliseconds. It also generates temporary SAS download links that expire after 60 minutes.
Key points
- costs roughly $75-250/month per search service, a high floor for small projects
- BlobLens is a self-hosted open-source tool that starts with one up command
- Built from a FastAPI backend, Meilisearch , and a background indexer worker
- Searches content inside 25+ file formats (PDF, DOCX, Markdown, source code) with ~10ms results
- Generates temporary SAS download links that expire after 60 minutes