Alternatives to MinIO for single-node local S3

Running Sentry on prem, I had to swap out their default SeaweedFS setup for Garage because the former kept failing under concurrent writes. I tried digging around for a bit, but found that the swap was easier and faster, Garage has also worked great for single node use cases (e.g. tested up to around 10 TB of data). I still think that SeaweedFS is a cool project, might have been a config issue or something, wasn’t worth tweaking.

The setup for Garage sucks, especially cause their Docker image doesn’t automatically create keys or buckets and permissions for you like for example various RDBMS images do. Doing that the first time manually was annoying, but their docs are pretty nice and an AI agent can build you your own Docker image with custom init in about 15 minutes.

Worst with it I’ve had were issues with hooking up WinSCP to it directly to browse saved satellite data, initial connections would hang for some reason, not sure what the problem was either.

Also used Zenko but kinda got the feeling that the project wasn’t as healthy and straight up felt abandoned (e.g. the outdated container images and such), though there is some activity.

> 2026-03-02: Ruohang Feng has forked MinIO to pgsty/minio and is promising to maintain a stable, CVE-patched, distribution.

This is what I went with.

I use it in end to end tests as an S3 simulator that starts and stops instantly and reads & writes to a local directory, - as you'd expect it's great in that role. No complaints. Given the fork's maintainer puts their real name on it & stakes their reputation, you'd assume it can be trusted - but my use case is simpler than most.

A notable mention should also be Versity GW, https://github.com/versity/versitygw/

Garage added an automatic configuration feature in v2.3.0 that makes it easier to set up single nodes:

  garage server --single-node --default-bucket

https://garagehq.deuxfleurs.fr/documentation/quick-start/

Often just spinning up `localstack` works well, even if only for S3. Gives you other AWS services if you ever need them.

A weird target, the author has.

The title is 'for single node local S3' but what they actually mean is 'for minio-compatibility', which is an entirely different question.

When I abandoned minio a year or so ago, I also surveyed the options, and settled on Garage. It lacked the GUI, but felt about the same complexity as minio. Perhaps a smidge more complexity, as I moved to 3-node and 5-node separate instances of garage, running as containers under Nomad.

I don't recall it being onerous, but I was looking for some basic S3-alike capabilities, not just minio-alike.

(How many people set out to build an object storage system with some number of AWS S3 primitives, but primarily try to match a third-party proprietary system's foibles?)

> So, Garage does work, but gosh…it is not just a drop-in replacement in terms of code changes.

I think in terms of actual code that uses local S3, it pretty much was a drop-in replacement. (I have multiple distribution/registry, Grafana Loki / Mimir, influx3 - all backing onto my object storage system, and the config changes there were modest - key+secret, and url - just as you'd expect.)

Filestash (https://github.com/mickael-kerjean/filestash) has a s3 gateway plugin that I made. It proxy the S3 traffic to any downstream storage: SFTP, FTP, another S3, SMB, NFS, IPFS, ...

Versity's posix backend was the one that stuck for us, multipart uploads land as real files on disk so you can inspect them with ls when a test fails.

For single-node local S3, I often just use `s3fs` mounting a local directory. MinIO always felt like overkill for simple dev.

I use JuiceFS https://github.com/juicedata/juicefs if you think the Chinese are worth the trust

I did try seaweedfs ~half a year ago and I had issues with setting up users through terraform module (if I recall correctly, users endpoint were not correctly responding on delete), and lack of S3 expiry rules (you needed to use seaweedfs configuration or API for that). Other than that, I was pretty happy with it.

I heard good news about SeaweedFS

I am using Garage for my local DEV environment.

https://garagehq.deuxfleurs.fr/

I enjoyed the smooth transition from minio to RustFS quite a lot.

Incus (spiritual successor to LXD, after the fork-off by Canonical) has a simple S3 server built-in.

One alternative worth looking at is S2: https://github.com/mojatter/s2

or rclone serve

Rustfs, works pretty well for me

Shout-out to rustfs.

Just use the damn file system. Why does everyone have to put HTTP between everything?