MinIO Docker Quickstart Guide

See our web documentation on Deploying MinIO in Standalone Mode for a more structured tutorial on deploying MinIO in a container.

Prerequisites

Docker installed on your machine. Download the relevant installer from here.

Run Standalone MinIO on Docker

Note: Standalone MinIO is intended for early development and evaluation. For production clusters, deploy a Distributed MinIO deployment.

MinIO needs a persistent volume to store configuration and application data. For testing purposes, you can launch MinIO by simply passing a directory (/data in the example below). This directory gets created in the container filesystem at the time of container start. But all the data is lost after container exits.

docker run \
  -p 9000:9000 \
  -p 9001:9001 \
  -e "MINIO_ROOT_USER=AKIAIOSFODNN7EXAMPLE" \
  -e "MINIO_ROOT_PASSWORD=wJalrXUtnFEMI/K7MDENG/bPxRfiCYEXAMPLEKEY" \
  quay.io/minio/minio server /data --console-address ":9001"

To create a MinIO container with persistent storage, you need to map local persistent directories from the host OS to virtual config. To do this, run the below commands

GNU/Linux and macOS

mkdir -p ~/minio/data

docker run \
  -p 9000:9000 \
  -p 9001:9001 \
  --name minio1 \
  -v ~/minio/data:/data \
  -e "MINIO_ROOT_USER=AKIAIOSFODNN7EXAMPLE" \
  -e "MINIO_ROOT_PASSWORD=wJalrXUtnFEMI/K7MDENG/bPxRfiCYEXAMPLEKEY" \
  quay.io/minio/minio server /data --console-address ":9001"

The command creates a new local directory ~/minio/data in your user home directory. It then starts the MinIO container with the -v argument to map the local path (~/minio/data) to the specified virtual container directory (/data). When MinIO writes data to /data, that data is actually written to the local path ~/minio/data where it can persist between container restarts.

Windows

docker run \
  -p 9000:9000 \
  -p 9001:9001 \
  --name minio1 \
  -v D:\data:/data \
  -e "MINIO_ROOT_USER=AKIAIOSFODNN7EXAMPLE" \
  -e "MINIO_ROOT_PASSWORD=wJalrXUtnFEMI/K7MDENG/bPxRfiCYEXAMPLEKEY" \
  quay.io/minio/minio server /data --console-address ":9001"

Run Distributed MinIO on Containers

We recommend kubernetes based deployment for production level deployment https://github.com/minio/operator.

See the Kubernetes documentation for more information.

MinIO Docker Tips

MinIO Custom Access and Secret Keys

To override MinIO's auto-generated keys, you may pass secret and access keys explicitly as environment variables. MinIO server also allows regular strings as access and secret keys.

GNU/Linux and macOS (custom access and secret keys)

docker run \
  -p 9000:9000 \
  -p 9001:9001 \
  --name minio1 \
  -e "MINIO_ROOT_USER=AKIAIOSFODNN7EXAMPLE" \
  -e "MINIO_ROOT_PASSWORD=wJalrXUtnFEMI/K7MDENG/bPxRfiCYEXAMPLEKEY" \
  -v /mnt/data:/data \
  quay.io/minio/minio server /data --console-address ":9001"

Windows (custom access and secret keys)

docker run \
  -p 9000:9000 \
  -p 9001:9001 \
  --name minio1 \
  -e "MINIO_ROOT_USER=AKIAIOSFODNN7EXAMPLE" \
  -e "MINIO_ROOT_PASSWORD=wJalrXUtnFEMI/K7MDENG/bPxRfiCYEXAMPLEKEY" \
  -v D:\data:/data \
  quay.io/minio/minio server /data --console-address ":9001"

Run MinIO Docker as a regular user

Docker provides standardized mechanisms to run docker containers as non-root users.

GNU/Linux and macOS (regular user)

On Linux and macOS you can use --user to run the container as regular user.

NOTE: make sure --user has write permission to ${HOME}/data prior to using --user.

mkdir -p ${HOME}/data
docker run \
  -p 9000:9000 \
  -p 9001:9001 \
  --user $(id -u):$(id -g) \
  --name minio1 \
  -e "MINIO_ROOT_USER=AKIAIOSFODNN7EXAMPLE" \
  -e "MINIO_ROOT_PASSWORD=wJalrXUtnFEMIK7MDENGbPxRfiCYEXAMPLEKEY" \
  -v ${HOME}/data:/data \
  quay.io/minio/minio server /data --console-address ":9001"

Windows (regular user)

On windows you would need to use Docker integrated windows authentication and Create a container with Active Directory Support

NOTE: make sure your AD/Windows user has write permissions to D:\data prior to using credentialspec=.

docker run \
  -p 9000:9000 \
  -p 9001:9001 \
  --name minio1 \
  --security-opt "credentialspec=file://myuser.json"
  -e "MINIO_ROOT_USER=AKIAIOSFODNN7EXAMPLE" \
  -e "MINIO_ROOT_PASSWORD=wJalrXUtnFEMIK7MDENGbPxRfiCYEXAMPLEKEY" \
  -v D:\data:/data \
  quay.io/minio/minio server /data --console-address ":9001"

MinIO Custom Access and Secret Keys using Docker secrets

To override MinIO's auto-generated keys, you may pass secret and access keys explicitly by creating access and secret keys as Docker secrets. MinIO server also allows regular strings as access and secret keys.

echo "AKIAIOSFODNN7EXAMPLE" | docker secret create access_key -
echo "wJalrXUtnFEMI/K7MDENG/bPxRfiCYEXAMPLEKEY" | docker secret create secret_key -

Create a MinIO service using docker service to read from Docker secrets.

docker service create --name="minio-service" --secret="access_key" --secret="secret_key" quay.io/minio/minio server /data

MinIO Custom Access and Secret Key files

To use other secret names follow the instructions above and replace access_key and secret_key with your custom names (e.g. my_secret_key,my_custom_key). Run your service with

docker service create --name="minio-service" \
  --secret="my_access_key" \
  --secret="my_secret_key" \
  --env="MINIO_ROOT_USER_FILE=my_access_key" \
  --env="MINIO_ROOT_PASSWORD_FILE=my_secret_key" \
  quay.io/minio/minio server /data

MINIO_ROOT_USER_FILE and MINIO_ROOT_PASSWORD_FILE also support custom absolute paths, in case Docker secrets are mounted to custom locations or other tools are used to mount secrets into the container. For example, HashiCorp Vault injects secrets to /vault/secrets. With the custom names above, set the environment variables to

MINIO_ROOT_USER_FILE=/vault/secrets/my_access_key
MINIO_ROOT_PASSWORD_FILE=/vault/secrets/my_secret_key

Retrieving Container ID

To use Docker commands on a specific container, you need to know the Container ID for that container. To get the Container ID, run

docker ps -a

-a flag makes sure you get all the containers (Created, Running, Exited). Then identify the Container ID from the output.

Starting and Stopping Containers

To start a stopped container, you can use the docker start command.

docker start <container_id>

To stop a running container, you can use the docker stop command.

docker stop <container_id>

MinIO container logs

To access MinIO logs, you can use the docker logs command.

docker logs <container_id>

Monitor MinIO Docker Container

To monitor the resources used by MinIO container, you can use the docker stats command.

docker stats <container_id>