12 December 2020 / TUTO, STORAGE, MINIO, DOCKER

Local MinIO Object Storage over Ngrok public HTTPS

Create in less than 5 minutes an Object Storage with local files exposed via HTTPS public URL. In this tutorial I use Docker to quickly run MinIO server, and ngrok to easily share files from local machine without messing with DNS and firewall settings.

You can use it to create an ephemeral private media sharing for friends and family.

Summary in two commands:

docker run --rm -p 9000:9000 \
  -v /tmp/local-data:/data \
  -e "MINIO_ACCESS_KEY=EXAMPLE_ACCESS_KEY" \
  -e "MINIO_SECRET_KEY=EXAMPLE_SECRET_KEY" \
  minio/minio server /data

./ngrok http 9000  

Read following step by step guide for explanations …

Prequistes

Download ngrok
Docker for minio (install alternatives without docker exists, read the doc)

Step 0 : Download and init ngrok

Download link: https://ngrok.com/download
Authenticate yourself to ngrok
Run following command over dowloaded ngrok binary file

./ngrok authtoke XXXXXX

Where XXXXXX is your account auth token. More on ngrok doc

Step 1 : Create MinIO server using Docker

mkdir /tmp/local-data

docker run --rm -p 9000:9000 \
  -v /tmp/local-data:/data \
  -e "MINIO_ACCESS_KEY=EXAMPLE_ACCESS_KEY" \
  -e "MINIO_SECRET_KEY=EXAMPLE_SECRET_KEY" \
  minio/minio server /data

NB : Replace EXAMPLE_ACCESS_KEY / EXAMPLE_SECRET_KEY with our more secure values.
NB : Replace /tmp/data with path of directory where you put files to share

Test using MinIO Browser:

Point your web browser to http://127.0.0.1:9000 to ensure your server has started successfully.

Step 2 : Connect to MinIO and create a bucket

From your web browser, go to http://127.0.0.1:9000, enter your EXAMPLE_ACCESS_KEY + EXAMPLE_SECRET_KEY (provided to server on previous step) as athentication credentials.

When you are connected on MinIO web app, create a bucket ex: bucket01

Step 3 : Expose the MinIO serve

Expose the MinIO server which is running on port 9000 by runnin following CMD :

cd /to-dir/of-ngrok/downloaded-file

./ngrok http 9000

The command will display a generated url like https://6441f740aac1.ngrok.io wich exposed the local MinIO web server.

NOTICE : You can replace ngrok with altenative solutiions like localtunnel