Flarum on Ubuntu 24.04 LTS by cloudimg

Flarum is a simple, fast and free open source forum platform for building online communities. It pairs a modern single page interface with a lightweight PHP backend, so your members can start discussions, reply, mention each other, react with likes, organise topics into tags, and moderate with a full permission system, all from one clean and responsive interface. This image is built and maintained by cloudimg on a hardened, fully patched Ubuntu 24.04 LTS base, with Flarum 1.8 served by nginx and PHP 8.3 FPM and a bundled local MariaDB server, so the appliance is complete and useful on its own.

The Flarum database is installed and ready, with a welcome discussion already in place, and a unique administrator password is generated on the first boot of every VM and written to a root only file. Flarum ships no default login, and the cloudimg image goes further: the admin account is created with a per VM secret and no known or blank credential authenticates. Browse to the forum on port 80, click Log In, and start building your community, then use the Administration panel to set your forum appearance, manage users and permissions, and install extensions.

The bundled MariaDB listens only on the loopback interface (127.0.0.1:3306) and is never exposed to the network. A single dedicated managed data disk carries both the MariaDB database and Flarum's writable storage and uploads, so all of your community content stays off the operating system disk and rides with the VM. An unauthenticated /healthz endpoint is provided for load balancer probes. Flarum bakes its base URL into the pages it serves, so for production, front port 80 with your own domain and TLS and set that address as the forum URL.

Flarum is free and open source software licensed under the MIT License. Flarum is a trademark of its respective owners; this image is provided by cloudimg and is not affiliated with or endorsed by the Flarum project. Backed by 24/7 cloudimg support.