Minio needs a persistent volume to store configuration and application data. However, for testing purposes, you can launch Minio by simply passing a directory (`/export` 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 `~/.minio` and export `/export` directories. To do this, run the below commands
Distributed Minio can be deployed via [Docker Compose](https://docs.minio.io/docs/deploy-minio-on-docker-compose) or [Swarm mode](https://docs.minio.io/docs/deploy-minio-on-docker-swarm). The major difference between these two being, Docker Compose creates a single host, multi-container deployment, while Swarm mode creates a multi-host, multi-container deployment.
This means Docker Compose lets you quickly get started with Distributed Minio on your computer - ideal for development, testing, staging environments. While deploying Distributed Minio on Swarm offers a more robust, production level deployment.
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.
### 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](https://docs.docker.com/engine/swarm/secrets/). Minio server also allows regular strings as access and secret keys.
To monitor the resources used by Minio container, you can use the [`docker stats`](https://docs.docker.com/engine/reference/commandline/stats/) command.