Coppermine Photo Gallery

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 good starting size.

Configure the network security group (NSG) to allow inbound 22/tcp from your management network and 80/tcp for the Coppermine web interface. For public exposure, put TLS in front of it (see Enabling HTTPS in Step 12).

Step 1 - Deploy from the Azure Marketplace

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

On the Basics tab, 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) and HTTP (80).

Review the dedicated data disk on the Disks tab, then select Review + create and Create.

Step 2 - Deploy with the Azure CLI

# Accept the Marketplace terms once per subscription (required before the first CLI deploy)
az vm image terms accept --urn sac1647283583153:coppermine-ubuntu-24-04:default:latest
az vm create \
  --resource-group <your-rg> --name coppermine \
  --image sac1647283583153:coppermine-ubuntu-24-04:default:latest \
  --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 coppermine --port 80 --priority 1010

Step 3 - Connect to your VM

ssh azureuser@<vm-public-ip>

Step 4 - Confirm the LAMP stack is running

On first boot, Coppermine rotates its database password, resets the administrator account to a fresh per-VM password, rotates the site security token and starts the stack. Confirm that all three services are active:

systemctl is-active nginx php8.3-fpm mariadb

Each service reports active. Next, check the component versions and confirm that the gallery answers on port 80:

php -v | head -1 mariadb --version curl -s -o /dev/null -w 'HTTP %{http_code}\n' http://127.0.0.1/

The gallery home returns HTTP 200. MariaDB listens on loopback only, and PHP-FPM runs on a Unix socket rather than a TCP port.

Step 5 - Retrieve the administrator password

Your VM generates its own administrator account on first boot. Read the credentials file as root:

sudo cat /root/coppermine-credentials.txt

The file (mode 600, owned by root) contains the login (admin), the sign-in URL and a unique password, plus the database name, user and password. The login form rejects every guessable default password. A fresh instance has exactly one account, your administrator.

Step 6 - Browse to your gallery

Browse to http://<vm-public-ip>/. The image ships with a seeded sample album, so you see a working gallery with rendered thumbnails instead of an empty install.

Step 7 - Sign in as the administrator

Browse to http://<vm-public-ip>/login.php. Sign in as admin with the password from the credentials file.

Step 8 - Browse an album and view a photo

Open the sample album from the gallery home to see its thumbnails. Coppermine automatically generates a thumbnail and an intermediate-size copy of every uploaded photo, so albums stay fast to browse.

Click any thumbnail to view the photo at intermediate size. A film strip of the rest of the album and navigation controls appear alongside it.

Step 9 - Create albums and upload your own photos

While signed in as the administrator, use the gallery menu to open the album and category managers. Create a category and add one or more albums to it. Then upload photos into an album. Coppermine builds the thumbnails and intermediate images for you.

You can delete the seeded sample album at any time.

Step 10 - How the image is secured

The Coppermine installer (install.php) and phpinfo.php are removed after the build, so a visitor cannot re-run the installer or read your server configuration. The database credential in include/config.inc.php and the sql/ schema files are denied over HTTP. Only the gallery itself is served. Confirm it:

curl -s -o /dev/null -w 'install.php HTTP %{http_code}\n' http://127.0.0.1/install.php
curl -s -o /dev/null -w 'config.inc.php HTTP %{http_code}\n' http://127.0.0.1/include/config.inc.php

Both requests return HTTP 404 or 403.

Step 11 - The dedicated data disk

The MariaDB database and every uploaded photo (originals plus generated thumbnails) live on a dedicated Azure data disk mounted at /var/lib/coppermine, separate from the OS disk. Your gallery stays independent of the OS image, and you can resize the disk as your collection grows. Check the mount:

df -h /var/lib/coppermine findmnt /var/lib/coppermine readlink -f /var/www/coppermine/albums

The albums/ directory resolves onto the data disk, and MariaDB's data directory is /var/lib/coppermine/mysql.

Step 12 - Enabling HTTPS

For any public deployment, put TLS in front of Coppermine. Point a DNS A record at your VM's public IP, then install a certificate with Certbot and the nginx plugin. Do the following on your VM, using your own domain name and contact email in place of the example values:

• Install Certbot: sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install -y certbot python3-certbot-nginx
• Obtain and install a certificate for your domain by running Certbot with the nginx plugin for your-domain.example.com. Supply your contact email when prompted.
• Coppermine derives its base URL from the request, so it switches generated links to https:// automatically once TLS is terminated in front of it. No configuration change is required.

Certbot installs a renewal timer automatically, and certificates renew without further action.

Step 13 - Maintenance

• Updates: The OS continues to receive unattended security updates. Update Coppermine itself from the admin tools, or replace the application files with a newer 1.6.x release and run its upgrade routine.
• Backups: Back up the MariaDB coppermine database (for example with mysqldump) and the /var/lib/coppermine/albums directory. Together they hold your gallery data and every uploaded photo.
• Logs: Web server logs are under /var/log/nginx/. PHP-FPM logs are in /var/log/php8.3-fpm.log.

Support

SecureAnyCloud maintains this image and provides 24/7 support. For help deploying or operating Coppermine Photo Gallery on Azure, contact the SecureAnyCloud team through the SecureAnyCloud website.

Deploy on Azure

Launch Coppermine Photo Gallery 1.6 on Ubuntu 24.04 LTS on Azure with 24/7 support from SecureAnyCloud.

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Need Help?

Our support team is available 24/7.

sales@secureanycloud.com