User Management

Overview

A MinIO user consists of a unique access key (username) and corresponding secret key (password). Clients must authenticate their identity by specifying both a valid access key (username) and the corresponding secret key (password) of an existing MinIO user.

Each user can have one or more assigned policies that explicitly list the actions and resources to which that user has access. Users can also inherit policies from the groups in which they have membership.

MinIO by default denies access to all actions or resources not explicitly allowed by a user’s assigned or inherited policies. You must either explicitly assign a policy describing the user’s authorized actions and resources or assign the user to groups which have associated policies. See Access Management for more information.

This page documents user management for the MinIO internal IDentity Provider (IDP). MinIO also external management of identities using either an OpenID Connect (OIDC) or Active Directory/LDAP IDentity Provider (IDP). For more information, see:

• OpenID Connect Access Management

• Active Directory / LDAP Access Management

Enabling external identity management disables the MinIO internal IDP, with the exception of creating access keys.

Access Keys

MinIO Access Keys (formerly “Service Accounts”) are child identities of an authenticated MinIO user, including externally managed identities. Each access key inherits its privileges based on the policies attached to it’s parent user or those groups in which the parent user has membership. Access keys also support an optional inline policy which further restricts access to a subset of actions and resources available to the parent user.

A MinIO user can generate any number of access keys. This allows application owners to generate arbitrary access keys for their applications without requiring action from the MinIO administrators. Since the generated access keys have the same or fewer permissions as the parents, administrators can focus on managing the top-level parent users without micro-managing generated access keys.

You can create access keys using either the MinIO Console or by using the mc admin user svcacct add command. Identities created by these methods do not expire until you remove the access key or the parent account.

You can also create security token service accounts programmatically with the AssumeRole STS API endpoint. STS tokens default to expire in 1 hour, but you set expiration for up to 7 days from creation.

MinIO root User

MinIO deployments have a root user with access to all actions and resources on the deployment, regardless of the configured identity manager. When a minio server first starts, it sets the root user credentials by checking the value of the following environment variables:

• MINIO_ROOT_USER

• MINIO_ROOT_PASSWORD

Rotating the root user credentials requires updating either or both variables for all MinIO servers in the deployment. Specify long, unique, and random strings for root credentials. Exercise all possible precautions in storing the access key and secret key, such that only known and trusted individuals who require superuser access to the deployment can retrieve the root credentials.

• MinIO strongly discourages using the root user for regular client access regardless of the environment (development, staging, or production).

• MinIO strongly recommends creating users such that each client has access to the minimal set of actions and resources required to perform their assigned workloads.

If these variables are unset, minio defaults to minioadmin and minioadmin as the access key and secret key respectively. MinIO strongly discourages use of the default credentials regardless of deployment environment.

User Management

mc admin user add ALIAS ACCESSKEY SECRETKEY

mc admin policy attach ALIAS readwrite --user=USERNAME

mc admin user rm ALIAS USERNAME