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Minio

Minio is a high performance distributed object storage server, designed for large-scale private cloud infrastructure.

However, at its simplest, Minio allows you to expose a local filestructure via the Amazon S3 API. You could, for example, use it to provide access to "buckets" (folders) of data on your filestore, secured by access/secret keys, just like AWS S3. You can further interact with your "buckets" with common tools, just as if they were hosted on S3.

Under a more advanced configuration, Minio runs in distributed mode, with features including high-availability, mirroring, erasure-coding, and "bitrot detection".

Minio Screenshot

Possible use-cases:

  1. Sharing files (protected by user accounts with secrets) via HTTPS, either as read-only or read-write, in such a way that the bucket could be mounted to a remote filesystem using common S3-compatible tools, like goofys. Ever wanted to share a folder with friends, but didn't want to open additional firewall ports etc?
  2. Simulating S3 in a dev environment
  3. Mirroring an S3 bucket locally

Minio Requirements

Ingredients

Already deployed:

Related:

Preparation

Setup data locations

We'll need a directory to hold our minio file store. You can create a blank directory wherever you like (I used /var/data/minio), or point the /data volume to a pre-existing folder structure.

mkdir /var/data/minio

Prepare Minio environment

Create minio.env, and populate with the variables below.

MINIO_ROOT_USER=hackme
MINIO_ROOT_PASSWORD=becauseiforgottochangethepassword
MINIO_BROWSER_REDIRECT_URL=https://minio-console.example.com
MINIO_SERVER_URL=https://minio.example.com

If minio redirects you to :9001

MINIO_BROWSER_REDIRECT_URL is especially important since recent versions of Minio will redirect web browsers to this URL when they hit the API directly. (If you find yourself redirected to http://your-minio-url:9001, then you've not set this value correctly!)

Minio Docker Swarm config

Create a docker swarm config file in docker-compose syntax (v3), something like the example below:

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version: '3.2'

services:
  app:
    image: minio/minio
    env_file: /var/data/config/minio/minio.env
    volumes:
     - /var/data/minio:/data
    networks:
      - traefik_public
    deploy:
      labels:
        # traefik
        - traefik.enable=true
        - traefik.docker.network=traefik_public 

        # traefikv1
        - traefik.frontend.rule=Host:minio.example.com
        - traefik.port=9000   

        - traefik.console.frontend.rule=Host:minio-console.example.com
        - traefik.console.port=9001 

        # traefikv2 (death-by-labels, much?)
        - traefik.http.middlewares.redirect-https.redirectScheme.scheme=https
        - traefik.http.middlewares.redirect-https.redirectScheme.permanent=true

        - traefik.http.routers.minio-https.rule=Host(`minio.example.com`)
        - traefik.http.routers.minio-https.entrypoints=https
        - traefik.http.routers.minio-https.service=minio
        - traefik.http.routers.minio-http.rule=Host(`minio.example.com`)
        - traefik.http.routers.minio-http.entrypoints=http
        - traefik.http.routers.minio-http.middlewares=redirect-https
        - traefik.http.routers.minio-http.service=minio
        - traefik.http.services.minio.loadbalancer.server.port=9000

        - traefik.http.routers.minio-console-https.rule=Host(`minio-console.example.com`)
        - traefik.http.routers.minio-console-https.entrypoints=https
        - traefik.http.routers.minio-console-https.service=minio-console
        - traefik.http.routers.minio-console-http.rule=Host(`minio-console.example.com`)
        - traefik.http.routers.minio-console-http.entrypoints=http
        - traefik.http.routers.minio-console-http.middlewares=redirect-https
        - traefik.http.routers.minio-console-http.service=minio-console
        - traefik.http.services.minio-console.loadbalancer.server.port=9001

    command:  minio server /data --console-address ":9001"

networks:
  traefik_public:
    external: true

Serving

Launch Minio stack

Launch the Minio stack by running `docker stack deploy minio -c <path -to-docker-compose.yml>

Log into your new instance at https://minio-console.**YOUR-FQDN**, with the root user and password you specified in minio.env.

If you created /var/data/minio, you'll see nothing. If you mapped /data to existing data, you should see all subdirectories in your existing folder represented as buckets.

Use the Minio console to create a user, or (ill-advisedly) continue using the root user/password!

If all you need is single-user access to your data, you're done! 🎉

If, however, you want to expose data to multiple users, at different privilege levels, you'll need the minio client to create some users and (potentially) policies...

Minio Trickz 🤡

Setup minio client

While it's possible to fully administer Minio using the console, it's also possible using the mc CLI client, as illustrated below

root@ds1:~# mc config host add minio http://app:9000 admin iambatman
mc: Configuration written to `/root/.mc/config.json`. Please update your access credentials.
mc: Successfully created `/root/.mc/share`.
mc: Initialized share uploads `/root/.mc/share/uploads.json` file.
mc: Initialized share downloads `/root/.mc/share/downloads.json` file.
Added `minio` successfully.
root@ds1:~#

Add (readonly) user

Use mc to add a (readonly or readwrite) user, by running mc admin user add minio <access key> <secret key> <access level>

Example:

root@ds1:~# mc admin user add minio spiderman peterparker readonly
Added user `spiderman` successfully.
root@ds1:~#

Confirm by listing your users (admin is excluded from the list):

root@node1:~# mc admin user list minio
enabled    spiderman             readonly
root@node1:~#

Make a bucket accessible to users

By default, all buckets have no "policies" attached to them, and so can only be accessed by the administrative user. Having created some readonly/read-write users above, you'll be wanting to grant them access to buckets.

The simplest permission scheme is "on or off". Either a bucket has a policy, or it doesn't. (I believe you can apply policies to subdirectories of buckets in a more advanced configuration)

After no policy, the most restrictive policy you can attach to a bucket is "download". This policy will allow authenticated users to download contents from the bucket. Apply the "download" policy to a bucket by running mc policy download minio/<bucket name>, i.e.:

root@ds1:# mc policy download minio/comics
Access permission for `minio/comics` is set to `download`
root@ds1:#

Advanced bucketing

There are some clever complexities you can achieve with user/bucket policies, including:

  • A public bucket, which requires no authentication to read or even write (for a public dropbox, for example)
  • A special bucket, hidden from most users, but available to VIP users by application of a custom "canned policy"

Mount a minio share remotely

Having setup your buckets, users, and policies - you can give out your minio external URL, and user access keys to your remote users, and they can S3-mount your buckets, interacting with them based on their user policy (read-only or read/write)

I tested the S3 mount using goofys, "a high-performance, POSIX-ish Amazon S3 file system written in Go".

First, I created ~/.aws/credentials, as per the following example:

[default]
aws_access_key_id=spiderman
aws_secret_access_key=peterparker

And then I ran (in the foreground, for debugging), goofys --f -debug_s3 --debug_fuse --endpoint=https://traefik.example.com <bucketname> <local mount point>

To permanently mount an S3 bucket using goofys, I'd add something like this to /etc/fstab:

goofys#bucket   /mnt/mountpoint        fuse     _netdev,allow_other,--file-mode=0666    0       0

Chef's notes 📓


  1. There are many S3-filesystem-mounting tools available, I just picked Goofys because it's simple. Google is your friend :) 

  2. Some applications (like NextCloud) can natively mount S3 buckets 

  3. Some backup tools (like Duplicity) can backup directly to S3 buckets 

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