Fresns on Ubuntu 24.04 LTS

A community platform you host and control

Fresns is an open source, self hosted community and social network platform. It is a content and social engine with a web admin control panel and an open API, built so a single backend can drive a forum, a microblog or a full social network and reach members across the web, mobile apps and mini programs. Members hold accounts and profiles, publish posts and comments, follow each other, join groups and interact; operators manage content, members, roles, languages and policies from the control panel. It is built on the Laravel framework and extended through a plugin, theme and app marketplace rather than by forking the core. This image gives you the whole platform on a VM you control, with your data in your own subscription.

Ready to sign in, not ready to configure

A manual Fresns installation drops you into a web installer that asks for database credentials, runs the migrations and seeds an administrator account. This image does that work for you. On the first boot of your VM the database, its least privilege user, the Laravel application key and the administrator account are all created automatically, the schema is migrated and seeded, and the interface language is set to English. You sign in to the control panel and start shaping your community, rather than provisioning a database first.

Secure by default, with no shared password

Nothing privileged is baked into the image. The captured image contains no configuration, no application key and no database content at all, so there is no shared administrator password anywhere, and the web server is held back by a systemd condition so it physically cannot serve the Fresns installer before your VM has been configured. On first boot the MariaDB root password, the application database password, the Laravel application key and the Fresns administrator password are each generated uniquely for your VM and written to a file only root can read.

The database is never exposed: MariaDB binds to the loopback interface only, the application connects as a least privilege account limited to its own database, and the environment file holding that password lives outside the web root and is refused over HTTP.

Your data on its own disks

The database and the application tier each get a dedicated Azure data disk, captured into the image and re-provisioned on every VM. Your accounts, posts and comments live on one; the application and the uploads it stores live on the other. Both can be resized independently and both survive an operating system disk swap.

What you get

• Fresns v3.8.1, the current upstream release, on fully patched Ubuntu 24.04 LTS
• Apache 2.4 and PHP 8.3 FPM with every extension Fresns and Laravel require, and MariaDB 10.11 on loopback only
• Composer 2 and the Fresns scheduler (as a managed systemd timer) so the control panel and cron work in production
• Interface language set to English
• Per VM administrator, Laravel application key, application database and MariaDB root secrets, with no default login in the image
• Two dedicated data disks, an unauthenticated health endpoint for load balancer probes, and a status page that proves the web, PHP and database tiers end to end
• A step by step deployment guide covering sign in, the dashboard, member management and site settings
• Unattended security upgrades left enabled, and 24/7 cloudimg support

Licensing

Fresns is distributed under the Apache License 2.0 and is free to redistribute. The cloudimg charge ($0.04 per vCPU/hour) covers packaging, security patching, image maintenance and 24/7 expert support. Fresns is a name and mark of the Fresns project and its contributors; cloudimg is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by that project.