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.docker.com/compose/overview/) or [Swarm mode](https://docs.docker.com/engine/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 deploy Distributed Minio on Docker Compose, refer [this guide](http://docs.minio.io/docs/deploy-minio-on-docker-compose).
* To deploy Distributed Minio on Docker Swarm, refer [this guide](https://docs.minio.io/docs/deploy-minio-on-docker-swarm).
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.
To monitor the resources used by Minio container, you can use the [`docker stats`](https://docs.docker.com/engine/reference/commandline/stats/) command.
