Replace MinIO with Garage — Community Edition is no longer maintained

[usnavy13]

MinIO's open-source Community Edition has reached end-of-life: the admin console was stripped in mid-2025, official binaries/Docker images were discontinued in Oct 2025, and the minio/minio repo was marked "no longer maintained" and archived by early 2026. It's still AGPL-3.0, but there are no further fixes — including security patches — and no official images, so it's worth replacing.

The project pulls minio/minio (and minio/mc) for the self-hosted storage role in docker-compose.*.yml and helm/codeapi/templates/minio-simple.yaml. Production can already point at AWS S3 (values.yaml s3.enabled), so this mainly affects local-dev and on-prem/self-hosted installs.

Suggested replacement: Garage. The project's S3 usage is narrow — service/src/file-server.ts only does core operations (putObject/getObject/statObject/listObjects/removeObject + X-Amz-Meta-* metadata), with no presigned URLs, bucket policies, versioning, or lifecycle rules. That sits entirely within what Garage supports, and the minio Node SDK works against Garage unchanged (path-style + SigV4), so no application code changes are expected. Garage is a stable, lightweight, single-binary, AGPL-3.0 store — the same license posture as the current MinIO setup.

[pedrojreis]

We are using RustFS and it's working great if that helps :)

[rehan243]

fwiw, I swapped out MinIO for Garage in a local-dev setup about a month ago after the admin console disappeared and the official Docker images started getting pulled. The project here relies on minio/minio and minio/mc in docker-compose, so I just replaced those services with Garage's single binary, setting up the S3 creds basically the same way. Didn't hit any snags with the putObject/getObject calls, the Node SDK still talks to Garage fine if you keep path-style and SigV4, just like you said.

One thing I noticed, the Garage docs are a bit light on bucket config, but it doesn't care about stuff like versioning or presigned URLs, so none of that broke. I did have to tweak the healthcheck in docker-compose since Garage doesn't expose the same /minio/health/live endpoint, but honestly, that's minor.

The only real gotcha was making sure the values.yaml S3 flags didn't get mixed up with local storage, since Garage isn't AWS S3 but pretends to be for the SDK, took me a few tries to get that straight. Are you planning to run Garage clustered or just single-node for dev? Curious if you've tried it with any of the more complex metadata stuff (like custom X-Amz-Meta-* values)?