eXist-db 6.4 on Ubuntu 24.04 LTS by cloudimg

eXist-db 6.4 on Ubuntu 24.04 LTS by cloudimg

eXist-db is an open source native XML database and application platform. Rather than mapping documents onto rows and columns, it stores XML, JSON and binary resources in hierarchical collections with their structure intact, so an XPath or XQuery 3.1 expression can address any element or attribute directly, and range, full text and n-gram indexes keep those lookups fast over large corpora. That makes it a natural fit for content that is genuinely document shaped: standards and legislation, dictionaries and lexicons, scholarly editions, catalogues, technical documentation and message archives.

It is also a place to build, not only to store. XQuery, XSLT and XForms execute inside the database, RESTXQ turns annotated XQuery functions into a REST API, and a plain REST interface stores and retrieves documents over HTTP, so an application can live next to its data. The bundled browser tools include a launcher dashboard, the eXide XQuery editor, a package manager, the Monex monitoring app and the XQuery function documentation.

### What cloudimg adds

A stock eXist-db install creates its `admin` account with an empty password and its `guest` account with the password `guest`, and eXist creates one further account per bundled application package whose password upstream sets equal to the account name. There is no upstream way to seed the administrator password offline, so this image ships with no database at all and none of those credentials exist in any state.

On first boot each VM builds its own database from the bundled application catalogue with no network access, sets a random administrator password written to a root-only file, rotates every other account to a value it immediately discards, and then proves that the empty administrator password, the `guest` default, each package account's own name and the internal `SYSTEM` and `nobody` accounts are all rejected. Only then is the public listener allowed to open, so port 80 is closed for the whole bootstrap and stays closed if any of it fails.

The database engine itself listens only on loopback and is reached through a single hardened nginx reverse proxy; the HTTPS connector shipped in the upstream distribution is disabled and its bundled keystore, a publicly downloadable private key, is removed. The JVM heap is capped explicitly and the database caches sized to fit it, so the image runs with no swap. Every release is paired with a deployment guide whose commands were executed against the image before capture.

### Support

cloudimg provides 24/7 support. The $0.04 per vCPU hour charge covers packaging, security patching, image maintenance and expert support. eXist-db is licensed under the GNU Lesser General Public License v2.1 and is free; the cloudimg charge is for the managed, patched, support-backed image.