Akkoma

Prerequisites

You need an active Azure subscription, an SSH key pair, and a VNet with a subnet in the target region.

Standard_B2s (2 vCPU / 4 GiB RAM) is a sensible starting size for evaluation. Choose a larger size for a busy instance, because Akkoma runs the BEAM VM plus PostgreSQL.

Configure the network security group (NSG) to allow inbound 22/tcp from your management network and 80/tcp for the web interface. The appliance serves the web UI over plain HTTP on port 80 on the VM's own IP for evaluation. Before you federate, set your own domain and a TLS certificate (see Step 9).

Step 1 - Deploy from the Azure Marketplace

Sign in to the Azure Portal, choose Create a resource, search the Marketplace for Akkoma by SecureAnyCloud, and select Create.

On the Basics tab, pick your subscription, resource group, region and size (Standard_B2s). Under Administrator account, choose SSH public key and paste your key. Under Inbound port rules, allow SSH (22) and HTTP (80).

Select Review + create, then Create.

Step 2 - Deploy from the Azure CLI

# Accept the Marketplace terms once per subscription (required before the first CLI deploy)
az vm image terms accept --urn sac1647283583153:akkoma-ubuntu-24-04:default:latest
az vm create \
  --resource-group <your-rg> \
  --name akkoma \
  --image sac1647283583153:akkoma-ubuntu-24-04:default:latest \
  --size Standard_B2s \
  --admin-username azureuser \
  --generate-ssh-keys \
  --public-ip-sku Standard

Open the web port on the VM's NSG:

az vm open-port --resource-group <your-rg> --name akkoma --port 80 --priority 900

Step 3 - Connect to your VM

ssh azureuser@<vm-public-ip>

Step 4 - Confirm the services are running

On first boot, the image generates the per-VM secrets, sets the instance domain to the VM public IP, creates the administrator account and starts the stack. Confirm that the services are active and that the app and database are bound to loopback only:

systemctl is-active postgresql nginx akkoma

sudo ss -tlnp | grep -E ':80 |:4000 |:5432 '

Step 5 - Check the health endpoints

The unauthenticated :80/healthz endpoint returns 200 for load-balancer probes. The Mastodon-compatible /api/v1/instance endpoint returns your instance metadata:

curl -s -o /dev/null -w '%{http_code}\n' http://127.0.0.1/healthz

curl -s http://127.0.0.1/api/v1/instance | python3 -m json.tool | grep -E '"uri"|"title"|"version"|"registrations"'

Step 6 - Retrieve the per-VM administrator credentials

First boot generates the administrator account and a strong password and writes them to a root-only file. The secrets in /etc/akkoma/config.exs are unique to this VM and never leave it. Read the credentials file:

sudo cat /root/akkoma-credentials.txt

The file records the web URL, the administrator username, email address and password.

Step 7 - Sign in to the web interface

Browse to http://<vm-public-ip>/. In the Log in panel on the left, enter the administrator username and password from the credentials file. After you sign in, your home timeline opens with the compose box on the left.

Step 8 - Post to your timeline

Type a message in the compose box and select Post. Your status appears immediately in the home timeline, which confirms that the full ActivityPub stack (Phoenix, PostgreSQL and the pleroma-fe front end) works end to end.

Step 9 - Set your own domain (do this BEFORE federating)

This is the most important step. Akkoma bakes its instance domain into accounts, posts and federation identifiers at setup and cannot cleanly change it later. The appliance boots with the domain set to the VM IP over plain HTTP, which is suitable only for evaluation. Before you create real accounts or federate, set your own domain:

• Point a DNS record (for example social.example.com) at the VM public IP.
• Edit /etc/akkoma/config.exs and set the endpoint host, scheme, port and media base URL for your domain:

config :pleroma, Pleroma.Web.Endpoint, url: [host: "social.example.com", scheme: "https", port: 443] config :pleroma, Pleroma.Upload, base_url: "https://social.example.com/media"

• Point the nginx server_name in /etc/nginx/sites-available/akkoma at your domain, install a real TLS certificate (for example with certbot --nginx), and reload nginx.
• Restart Akkoma so the new configuration takes effect:

sudo systemctl restart akkoma nginx

Federation with the wider fediverse requires a real domain and a valid TLS certificate. A bare IP over HTTP is suitable only for evaluating the software.

Step 10 - Administration dashboard

The admin-fe dashboard manages users, statuses, reports, moderation, relays and instance settings. Open http://<vm-public-ip>/pleroma/admin/ and choose Log in via PleromaFE to authenticate with your existing session. The appliance ships no default credentials. Every secret and the administrator account are generated uniquely per VM on first boot, and open registration is disabled by default.

Maintenance and production notes

• pleroma_ctl: manage the instance with /opt/akkoma/bin/pleroma_ctl, run as the akkoma user. Use it for tasks such as pleroma_ctl user new, pleroma_ctl user set, database migrations and frontend updates.
• Media and disk size: a real instance accumulates federated media under /var/lib/akkoma/uploads. For production, attach a larger disk or configure object storage, and back up the PostgreSQL akkoma database regularly.
• Updates: apply OS security updates with sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade. Akkoma version upgrades follow the upstream release notes (pleroma_ctl update).
• Security: the appliance ships no default credentials. Every secret and the administrator account are generated uniquely per VM on first boot. Keep /root/akkoma-credentials.txt protected, and change the administrator password after your first sign-in.

Akkoma is free software licensed under the AGPL-3.0. This image is produced by SecureAnyCloud and is not affiliated with, sponsored by, or endorsed by the Akkoma project.

Deploy on Azure

Launch Akkoma on Ubuntu 24.04 LTS on Azure with 24/7 support from SecureAnyCloud.

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sales@secureanycloud.com