ChiefOnboarding

Prerequisites

You need an active Azure subscription, an SSH key pair, and a VNet and subnet in the target region. Standard_B2s (2 vCPU / 4 GiB RAM) is a comfortable starting size for the two-container stack.

In the network security group (NSG), allow inbound 22/tcp from your management network and 80/tcp from the clients that will use ChiefOnboarding. The app serves plain HTTP, so put it behind your own domain and TLS for production.

Step 1 - Deploy from the Azure Marketplace

Sign in to the Azure Portal, select Create a resource, search the Marketplace for ChiefOnboarding by SecureAnyCloud, and select Create. On Basics, pick your subscription, resource group, region and size. Under Administrator account, choose SSH public key and paste your key. Under Inbound port rules, allow SSH (22), then add 80 after deployment. Select Review + create, then Create.

Step 2 - Deploy from the Azure CLI

az vm create \
  --resource-group <your-rg> \
  --name chiefonboarding \
  --image <marketplace-image-urn> \
  --size Standard_B2s \
  --admin-username azureuser \
  --ssh-key-values ~/.ssh/id_ed25519.pub \
  --vnet-name <your-vnet> --subnet <your-subnet> \
  --public-ip-sku Standard
az vm open-port --resource-group <your-rg> --name chiefonboarding --port 80 --priority 1010

Step 3 - Connect to your VM

ssh azureuser@<vm-public-ip>

Step 4 - Confirm the stack is running

ChiefOnboarding runs as a Docker Compose stack managed by a single systemd unit. On first boot the stack rotates every secret, re-points its URLs at your VM's address, recreates itself on a fresh database and creates the administrator account. The multi-container stack can take a minute or two to become fully healthy after the VM is created.

systemctl is-active chiefonboarding.service

It reports active. You can list the running containers with:

sudo docker compose -f /var/lib/chiefonboarding/docker-compose.yml ps

The whole stack is managed as one systemd unit. Use sudo systemctl status chiefonboarding and sudo systemctl restart chiefonboarding to control every container together.

Step 5 - Retrieve your per-VM admin credentials

The administrator account is created uniquely on the first boot of your VM and its password is written to a root-only file. Confirm that the file exists. It is 0600 and root-only:

sudo ls -l /root/chiefonboarding-credentials.txt

Then read it to get your credentials:

sudo cat /root/chiefonboarding-credentials.txt

The file contains CHIEFONBOARDING_URL (the address to browse to), CHIEFONBOARDING_ADMIN_EMAIL and CHIEFONBOARDING_ADMIN_PASSWORD (for the web UI). Store them somewhere safe.

Step 6 - Confirm the endpoints are healthy

The web UI answers on port 80. There is also a lightweight /health endpoint that always returns ok:

curl -s -o /dev/null -w 'web UI -> HTTP %{http_code}\n' http://localhost/

It returns HTTP 200. The health endpoint returns ok:

curl -s http://localhost/health

Confirm which ports are published. PostgreSQL is deliberately not among them. It stays on the internal Docker network:

sudo ss -tlnp | grep ':80 ' | awk '{print $1, $4}'

Step 7 - Confirm the pinned release

The images are pinned to ChiefOnboarding v2.4.1 and PostgreSQL 16 so the appliance never silently upgrades:

sudo docker compose -f /var/lib/chiefonboarding/docker-compose.yml images

Step 8 - Sign in to the web UI

Browse to http://<vm-public-ip>/ and sign in with the email and password from Step 5.

After signing in as an administrator, you land on the New hires dashboard, which lists everyone currently being onboarded, their start date, position and progress.

Step 9 - Build onboarding sequences and task templates

Under Sequences, build reusable onboarding sequences: the ordered set of to-do items, resources, introductions and messages that a new hire receives on a schedule. The image ships with an example General sequence to show the structure.

Under Templates, manage the building blocks that sequences assign to new hires: To do items, resources, introductions, preboarding pages and badges. Each item can be tagged and reused across sequences.

Building your first onboarding flow

In the web UI, follow these steps:

• Under Templates, create the To do items, Resources and Introductions that a new hire needs.
• Under Sequences, create a sequence and add those items with the timing you want (for example "on day 1" or "3 days before start").
• Under People, add a new hire, set their start date and assign the sequence.

ChiefOnboarding then walks that person through their tasks on the schedule you defined, through their own web portal or, if you connect it, the Slack bot. Everything you create is stored in PostgreSQL on your own VM.

An optional Slack bot lets new hires complete to-do items and receive resources directly in Slack. You can enable email or text-message notifications from Settings. See the ChiefOnboarding documentation for the full configuration and integration reference.

Maintenance

• Admin credentials: the per-VM administrator account is in /root/chiefonboarding-credentials.txt. Change the password from your profile settings in the web UI after your first sign-in.
• Custom domain: the URLs are pinned to the VM's address at first boot. If you reach the VM through a DNS name or a different IP, add it to ALLOWED_HOSTS and update BASE_URL and CSRF_TRUSTED_ORIGINS in /var/lib/chiefonboarding/.env. Then run sudo systemctl restart chiefonboarding.
• TLS and HTTPS: ChiefOnboarding serves plain HTTP on port 80. For production, put a TLS reverse proxy (Caddy, or nginx with certbot) in front of port 80 for your own domain and set HTTP_INSECURE=False in /var/lib/chiefonboarding/.env.
• Data: the PostgreSQL database lives in the pgdata Docker volume. For backups, snapshot the OS disk or use pg_dump against the db container.
• Stack: manage the whole stack with sudo systemctl <status|restart|stop> chiefonboarding, or manage individual containers with sudo docker compose -f /var/lib/chiefonboarding/docker-compose.yml <ps|logs|restart>.
• Security patches: unattended-upgrades remains enabled, so the OS continues to receive security updates automatically.

Support

SecureAnyCloud provides 24/7 expert support for this image. Contact sales@secureanycloud.com.

Deploy on Azure

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

View on Marketplace

Need Help?

Our support team is available 24/7.

sales@secureanycloud.com