Swift 6.3 Server-Side Runtime on Ubuntu 24.04

A ready to use server-side Swift development and runtime environment. You connect over SSH and use it to build, run, test and debug your own Swift services. This image is deliberately a development machine rather than a hosted service: it runs no network service of its own, so on a fresh virtual machine the only listening socket reachable from outside the machine is SSH on port 22. There is no web console and no login page, and consequently no credential of any kind ships in the image — there is nothing to authenticate against and nothing to rotate.

A toolchain you can trust. It ships the official swift.org build of Swift 6.3.3, the current stable release, for Ubuntu 24.04. At build time cloudimg imports the Swift release-signing key, verifies the toolchain tarball's GPG signature — a good signature from the Swift 6.x Release Signing Key — and additionally pins the exact bytes by SHA-256. The compiler in the image is provably the one swift.org published: not a source rebuild and not a distribution package.

Everything needed to build a Swift service. The Swift compiler, the Swift Package Manager that resolves and builds package dependencies, the LLDB debugger, the Foundation library and the sourcekit-lsp language server are all present and on the PATH — in login shells, non interactive SSH commands and systemd units alike. SwiftNIO, the event driven networking framework that Vapor and Hummingbird are built on, resolves and compiles cleanly, so the same machine that builds a small HTTP handler will build a full web service.

Verify it before you trust it. A single command, cloudimg-swift-selftest, compiles and runs a native Swift program and checks the value it computes, then builds the bundled SwiftNIO server, starts it on the loopback interface and calls it with curl, confirming the toolchain compiles, links, resolves packages and serves. A working SwiftNIO sample ships as source so you can build and run a real server-side Swift app in seconds and then replace it with your own.

Every bundled component — the Swift compiler and standard library, Swift Package Manager, Foundation, and the bundled LLDB, LLVM and clang — is Apache-2.0 (the compiler and standard library carry the Swift Runtime Library Exception; the bundled LLVM tools carry the LLVM Exception). There is no GPL, AGPL, BSL or SSPL component and no per CPU or per deployment software fee. Every upstream licence and notice is shipped inside the image and indexed by a single notice file. Swift is a trademark of Apple Inc.; cloudimg is not affiliated with, sponsored by, or endorsed by Apple Inc., and the Swift name is used here only to identify the software this image contains. cloudimg provides the packaging, the verified and pinned toolchain, security patching, a paired deployment guide and 24/7 support with a guaranteed 24 hour response SLA.