OpenOLAT on Ubuntu 24.04 LTS
by cloudimg
Self hosted open source LMS for courses and assessments, with a unique admin login per VM.
A complete learning management system
OpenOLAT is a mature open source learning management system used by universities, schools and training organisations, among them the Universities of Zurich, Bern and Innsbruck. It brings course design and delivery together in one web platform: a visual course editor with learning paths, SCORM, xAPI and IMS content packages, tests and a shared question bank built on QTI 2.1, assessment and grading tools, groups with forums, wikis and file sharing, e-portfolios, curriculum management, certificates and badges, calendars and virtual classroom integrations.
What is on it
OpenOLAT 21.0.3 from the official release, verified at build time to be built from the upstream OpenOLAT_21.0.3 tag, deployed on a dedicated Apache Tomcat 10.1 with OpenJDK 21 on Ubuntu 24.04 LTS. PostgreSQL 16 holds the database and listens on the loopback interface only. nginx serves the platform over HTTPS on port 443, and port 80 only redirects to HTTPS. The Java heap is sized automatically from the VM's memory, so choosing a larger VM gives OpenOLAT more memory with no configuration. The database schema is created during the image build, so there is no setup wizard and nothing to configure before you sign in.
No shared credential
OpenOLAT seeds a built-in administrator account with a published default password. In this image that default is never written to the database: the build seeds a random value instead and rotates it again before capture to one nobody records, and the database role carries no password at all in the image. On each VM's first boot a one-shot service generates the administrator password, the database password, OpenOLAT's maintenance and session administration URL tokens, its installation identifier and the HTTPS certificate, writes the credentials to a root-only file, and only then starts the application and the web server. Two VMs launched from this image were compared before release, and every one of these secrets differed.
Exposed surface
Off the VM, this image listens on ports 22, 80 and 443 only, and port 80 serves nothing but a redirect to HTTPS. Tomcat listens on the loopback interface with no shutdown port and no sample applications. Self-registration, guest access and the REST API are switched off until you enable them, and Ubuntu's unattended security upgrades stay on.
Licence and trademark
OpenOLAT is published under the Apache License, Version 2.0, and the licence and the project's NOTICE file ship in the image. OpenOlat and the OpenOlat logo are trademarks of frentix GmbH, Zurich. cloudimg is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by frentix GmbH; the name is used only to identify the software this image runs.
Support
24/7 support from cloudimg, and a step by step deployment guide covering first sign in, building and publishing a course, outbound email, a custom domain and certificate, backups and upgrades.