LEMP Stack on Ubuntu 24.04 LTS by cloudimg

LEMP Stack on Ubuntu 24.04 LTS

The LEMP stack is the nginx counterpart of the classic LAMP stack: Linux, nginx, MariaDB and PHP. Where Apache traditionally embeds a PHP interpreter in the web server process, nginx keeps the two separate, serving static files itself and passing PHP requests to a dedicated PHP FPM process pool over a unix socket. That event driven design is why LEMP sustains far more simultaneous connections on the same hardware, which makes it the default choice for busy content management systems, custom PHP sites and API backends.

This image assembles and hardens the whole stack so there is nothing to wire up. nginx 1.24 serves port 80 with PHP dispatched to an FPM pool, PHP 8.3 ships with the extension set modern applications expect, and MariaDB 10.11 is bound to the loopback interface only, so the database is never exposed to the network. phpMyAdmin 5.2.3 is included at /phpmyadmin for browser based database administration.

Secure by default. No password ships in the image. On the first boot of every VM a one shot service generates a unique database root password, a unique phpMyAdmin control password and a unique random blowfish secret, and records them in a root only file. Every built in account is checked to reject published default credentials, the anonymous accounts and the test database are removed, and the on box root account is pinned to unix socket authentication so it has no network usable password at all.

Ready for your application. An application database and a least privilege user are created on first boot, with the connection details written to a file readable by the web user but outside the document root, so your code can connect immediately and the password is never web reachable. A live status page proves nginx, PHP FPM and MariaDB are all working together. Two dedicated managed data disks keep the database and the web document root off the operating system disk and independently resizable, and an unauthenticated /healthz endpoint is provided for load balancer probes.

Built and maintained by cloudimg on a hardened, fully patched Ubuntu 24.04 LTS base. nginx is licensed under BSD-2-Clause, MariaDB Server and phpMyAdmin under GPL-2.0, and PHP under the PHP License 3.01.