Run Minio on Dokku

Perquisites

What is Minio?

Minio is an object storage server, and API compatible with Amazon S3 cloud storage service. Read more at the minio.io website.

What is Dokku?

Dokku is the smallest PaaS implementation you've ever seen - Docker powered mini-Heroku.

Requirements

• A working Dokku host

Setup

We are going to use the domain minio.example.com and Dokku app minio for demonstration purposes. Make sure to replace it.

Create the app

Log onto your Dokku Host to create the Minio app:

dokku apps:create minio

Configuration

Setting environment variables

Minio uses two access keys (ACCESS_KEY and SECRET_KEY) for authentication and object management. The following commands sets a random strings for each access key.

dokku config:set --no-restart minio MINIO_ROOT_USER=$(echo `openssl rand -base64 45` | tr -d \=+ | cut -c 1-20)
dokku config:set --no-restart minio MINIO_ROOT_PASSWORD=$(echo `openssl rand -base64 45` | tr -d \=+ | cut -c 1-32)

To login in the browser or via API, you will need to supply both the ACCESS_KEY and SECRET_KEY. You can retrieve these at any time while logged in on your host running dokku via dokku config minio.

Note: if you do not set these keys, Minio will generate them during startup and output them to the log (check if via dokku logs minio). You will still need to set them manually.

You'll also need to set other two environment variables:

• NGINX_MAX_REQUEST_BODY: used in the custom nginx.conf for this Dokku app to allow uploads up to 15MB to the HTTP server (if the file size is greater than 15MB, s3cmd will split in 15MB parts).
• MINIO_DOMAIN: used to tell Minio the domain name being used by the server.

dokku config:set --no-restart minio NGINX_MAX_REQUEST_BODY=15M
dokku config:set --no-restart minio MINIO_DOMAIN=minio.example.com

Note: if you're using s4cmd instead, be sure to pass the following parameters: --multipart-split-size=15728640 --max-singlepart-upload-size=15728640.

Persistent storage

To persists uploaded data between restarts, we create a folder on the host machine, add write permissions to the user defined in Dockerfile and tell Dokku to mount it to the app container.

sudo mkdir -p /var/lib/dokku/data/storage/minio
sudo chown 32769:32769 /var/lib/dokku/data/storage/minio
dokku storage:mount minio /var/lib/dokku/data/storage/minio:/home/dokku/data

Domain setup

To get the routing working, we need to apply a few settings. First we set the domain.

dokku domains:set minio minio.example.com

The parent Dockerfile, provided by the Minio project, exposes port 9000 for web requests. Dokku will set up this port for outside communication, as explained in its documentation. Because we want Minio to be available on the default port 80 (or 443 for SSL), we need to fiddle around with the proxy settings.

First add the correct port mapping for this project as defined in the parent Dockerfile.

dokku proxy:ports-add minio http:80:9000
dokku proxy:ports-add minio https:443:9000
dokku proxy:ports-add minio https:9001:9001

Next remove the proxy mapping added by Dokku.

dokku proxy:ports-remove minio http:80:5000

Push Minio to Dokku

Grabbing the repository

First clone this repository onto your machine.

Via SSH

git clone git@github.com:slypix/minio-dokku.git

Via HTTPS

git clone https://github.com/slypix/minio-dokku.git

Set up git remote

Now you need to set up your Dokku server as a remote.

git remote add dokku dokku@example.com:minio

Push Minio

Now we can push Minio to Dokku (before moving on to the next part).

git push dokku master

SSL certificate

Last but not least, we can go an grab the SSL certificate from Let's Encrypt. You'll need dokku-letsencrypt plugin installed. If it's not, install by running:

dokku plugin:install https://github.com/dokku/dokku-letsencrypt.git

Now get the SSL certificate:

dokku config:set --no-restart minio DOKKU_LETSENCRYPT_EMAIL=you@example.com
dokku letsencrypt:enable minio
dokku proxy:ports-set minio https:443:9000

Note: you must execute these steps after pushing the app to Dokku host.

Wrapping up

Your Minio instance should now be available on minio.example.com.