Alternatives to MinIO for single-node local S3

> 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/

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, ...

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/

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.

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

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

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

I am using Garage for my local DEV environment.

https://garagehq.deuxfleurs.fr/

or rclone serve

Shout-out to rustfs.

Rustfs, works pretty well for me

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