MinIO Standalone Installation Guide on Ubuntu VM

Document describes How to Set Up MinIO Object Storage Server in Standalone Mode on Ubuntu

Overview

This document guides you through installing MinIO in standalone mode on a single Ubuntu-based VM, either from AWS Cloud or a native datacenter/server. This setup is suitable for development, testing, or small production use cases, with flexibility to scale into a distributed cluster later.

Prerequisites

• Operating System: Ubuntu 20.04+ VM (AWS EC2 or native server)

• 2vCPU / 4 GB RAM / 32 GB storage

• Root or sudo access to the VM

• Filesystem Recommendation: XFS over LVM (preferred for performance; ext4 can also be used initially)

Minio standalone installation steps

1. Run this to update and install dependencies

   sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade -y
   sudo apt install -y curl wget

2. Install MinIO

   Create user and data directory:

   # Create a system user 'minio-user' with no login shell
   sudo useradd -r minio-user -s /sbin/nologin
   
   # Create the directory for MinIO data
   sudo mkdir -p /data/minio
   
   # Set ownership of the directory to 'minio-user'
   sudo chown -R minio-user:minio-user /data/min

   Download MinIO binary:

   wget https://dl.min.io/server/minio/release/linux-amd64/minio
   chmod +x minio
   sudo mv minio /usr/local/bin/

3. Create MinIO Systemd Service

   Create the service file:

   sudo nano /etc/systemd/system/minio.service

   Paste the following configuration:

   [Unit]
   Description=MinIO
   After=network.target
   
   [Service]
   User=minio-user
   Group=minio-user
   ExecStart=/usr/local/bin/minio server /data/minio --console-address ":9001"
   Restart=always
   LimitNOFILE=65536
   Environment="MINIO_ACCESS_KEY=minioadmin"
   Environment="MINIO_SECRET_KEY=minioadmin123"
   
   [Install]
   WantedBy=multi-user.target

   Note: Change MINIO_ACCESS_KEY and MINIO_SECRET_KEY to secure values.

4. Start and Enable MinIO

   sudo systemctl daemon-reexec
   sudo systemctl enable minio
   sudo systemctl start minio
   sudo systemctl status minio

5. Access MinIO Web Console

   1. Open your browser and go to: http://<your-server-ip>:9001

   2. Login using the MINIO_ACCESS_KEY and MINIO_SECRET_KEY.

Scaling later (Distributed MinIO)

• You can scale to a multi-node distributed setup by adding VMs and drives.

• MinIO supports erasure coding, high availability, and horizontal scalability.

• Ensure:

  • Consistent hardware across nodes (CPU, RAM, disk)

  • XFS file system across all volumes