Anubis on Ubuntu 24.04

Anubis is the open source Web AI Firewall: a single Go binary that sits in front of your application as a reverse proxy and weighs the soul of every incoming request to keep AI scrapers and abusive crawlers off your site. Normal visitors flow straight through to your upstream, suspicious browsers are served a lightweight proof of work challenge, and known AI crawler user agents (Amazonbot, Bytespider, the GPTBot family, anthropic-ai, PerplexityBot, Scrapy and many more) are blocked by default, so aggressive bots stop hammering your site and running up your bandwidth. This cloudimg image installs the latest stable Anubis release on Ubuntu 24.04 LTS, baked reproducibly with its version recorded on the VM.

HTTPS is ready out of the box. In this image nginx terminates TLS on port 443 and reverse proxies to Anubis on the loopback interface, forwarding the real client address. On first boot each VM generates a fresh self signed certificate and Anubis's ED25519 cookie signing key directly into its configuration. The key is unique to the VM and is generated from the kernel random source; the shipped image carries only a placeholder, so no two instances share a signing key and no default secret ever ships. A tiny nginx serves an unauthenticated health probe on port 80 and a redirect to HTTPS.

You bring your own upstream. Anubis protects whatever you set as its target; the image ships a small demo upstream so you can see the firewall working the moment it boots, then you repoint the target at your own application. Prometheus metrics on the loopback interface show exactly how many requests were allowed, challenged and denied, broken down by rule, ready to scrape into your monitoring. The built in default policy already allows normal visitors and blocks a large list of known AI scrapers, and you can supply your own policy file to tune it.

Anubis is MIT licensed, free and open source with no per user or per deployment fee. cloudimg provides packaging, per instance key and TLS automation, the working demo upstream, security patching and 24/7 support with a guaranteed 24 hour response SLA. Anubis is an independent open source project by Techaro and this image is not affiliated with or endorsed by Techaro or the Anubis project.