See our web documentation on [Deploying MinIO in Standalone Mode](Deploy Standalone MinIO in a Container) for a more structured tutorial on deploying MinIO in a container.
*Note*: Standalone MinIO is intended for early development and evaluation. For production clusters, deploy a [Distributed](https://docs.min.io/minio/baremetal/installation/deployment-and-management.html) 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.
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
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.
Distributed MinIO can be deployed via [Docker Compose](https://docs.min.io/docs/deploy-minio-on-docker-compose). This means Docker Compose lets you quickly get started with Distributed MinIO on your computer - ideal for development, testing, staging environments. We recommend kubernetes based deployment for production level deployment <https://github.com/minio/operator>.
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.
On windows you would need to use [Docker integrated windows authentication](https://success.docker.com/article/modernizing-traditional-dot-net-applications#integratedwindowsauthentication) and [Create a container with Active Directory Support](https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/containerstuff/2017/01/30/create-a-container-with-active-directory-support/)
> NOTE: make sure your AD/Windows user has write permissions to *D:\data* prior to using `credentialspec=`.
To override MinIO's auto-generated keys, you may pass secret and access keys explicitly by creating access and secret keys as [Docker secrets](https://docs.docker.com/engine/swarm/secrets/). MinIO server also allows regular strings as access and secret keys.
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
`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
To monitor the resources used by MinIO container, you can use the [`docker stats`](https://docs.docker.com/engine/reference/commandline/stats/) command.
