Cockpit CMS on Ubuntu 24.04 LTS

Cockpit CMS is an open source, API first (headless) content platform. You model your content in a clean admin interface as collections and singletons made of typed fields, manage media in a built in asset manager, and read everything back through a documented REST and GraphQL Content API. Because it is headless it never dictates how your site or app is built: the same content can feed a website, a mobile app, a static site generator or several frontends at once. This image is built and maintained by cloudimg on a hardened, fully patched Ubuntu 24.04 LTS base, running Cockpit CMS 2.14.0 behind nginx with PHP 8.3 FPM. Cockpit stores its content in a self contained, file based datastore, so there is no separate database server to run.

Security is built in, and it goes further than shipping no default password. This image deliberately ships uninstalled, with no users and no application security key. On the first boot of every VM a one shot service generates a unique application security key, seeds a single administrator account with a strong per VM password, and writes those credentials to a root only file. Two VMs therefore never share any secret, and the shared key baked into the upstream source is always overridden per VM.

Until that finishes, nginx serves Cockpit on the loopback interface only and nothing is published on port 80, so an instance is never reachable from the network in an unclaimed, unconfigured state where a passer by could seize the installer. The design is fail closed: if first boot cannot complete, port 80 is never bound at all. The web installer is denied at the web server, and the raw datastore, config and dotfiles are never web served.

In use, you model content as collections and singletons, add typed fields, and manage entries and assets entirely in the admin interface without touching code. Every model is immediately available over the REST and GraphQL Content API, secured with scoped API keys, so any frontend can read your content as JSON. Editors get a clean editing experience while developers keep full control of how content is delivered.

Cockpit CMS is free software licensed under the MIT License. This image is provided by cloudimg and is not affiliated with or endorsed by the Cockpit project. Backed by 24/7 cloudimg support.