Open Monograph Press

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 sensible starting point for a small press. Move up to Standard_D2s_v3 for larger catalogues or heavy submission volume.

NSG inbound rules: allow 22/tcp from your management network, 80/tcp for the application and 443/tcp if you terminate TLS on the VM. The bundled MariaDB is never exposed. It listens on 127.0.0.1 only, so port 3306 stays off the network.

Step 1 - Deploy from the Azure Marketplace

In the Azure portal, choose Create a resource, search for Open Monograph Press (OMP) on Ubuntu 24.04 LTS by SecureAnyCloud, and select Create.

Pick your subscription, resource group and region, and choose the Standard_B2s size. Select SSH public key authentication with the username azureuser, and allow inbound ports 22, 80 and 443.

The image attaches its own 20 GiB data disk for your database and manuscript files, so you do not need to add one.

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:open-monograph-press-ubuntu-24-04:default:latest
az vm create \
  --resource-group <your-rg> \
  --name omp \
  --image sac1647283583153:open-monograph-press-ubuntu-24-04:default:latest \
  --size Standard_B2s \
  --admin-username azureuser \
  --generate-ssh-keys \
  --public-ip-sku Standard

Then open ports 80 and 443:

az vm open-port --resource-group <your-rg> --name omp --port 80,443

Step 3 - Confirm the services are running

Connect to the VM over SSH as azureuser and confirm that Apache, MariaDB and the first boot service are all active. MariaDB is bound to 127.0.0.1:3306 only, while Apache serves on port 80.

systemctl is-active apache2 mariadb omp-firstboot

Expected output:

active active active

Step 4 - Retrieve the per VM administrator password

On the first boot of every VM, a one-shot service generates a fresh administrator password and a fresh database password, both unique to that instance, and writes them to a root-only file. Read the file over SSH:

sudo cat /root/omp-credentials.txt

The file lists the administrator username (admin) and its generated password, the URL to browse to, and the loopback MariaDB details. Store the password somewhere safe.

The OMP_URL line is the VM's address as seen from inside the VM, which on Azure is usually the private address. Browsing the public IP shown in the Azure portal works identically, because the image derives OMP's base URL from the request rather than baking in a fixed address.

Step 5 - Sign in

Browse to http://<your-vm-public-ip>/ and choose Login. Sign in with the username admin and the password from the credentials file.

After you sign in as the site administrator, you land in the administration area. From there you manage the whole installation: the hosted presses, site-wide settings, system information and more.

Step 6 - Create your first press

OMP hosts one or more independent presses in a single installation. From Administration, choose Hosted Presses, then Create Press. Give the press a name, an acronym, a contact name and email, a country and a short URL path (for example aap). Save the form, and the press is created with its own reader-facing catalogue and its own editorial workspace.

Step 7 - Run the editorial workflow

Open your press's Editor Dashboard to run the scholarly book workflow end to end: incoming submissions, the internal and external review stages, copyediting, production and scheduling for publication. Each stage is a filtered view of the submissions assigned to you and your team.

Once titles are published, they appear in the press's public catalogue, the reader-facing storefront where visitors browse and read your books by series and category.

Step 8 - No known or default credentials

This image ships with no usable login. OMP is fully installed at build time, and then the shipped administrator password hash and the shipped database password are both rotated to discarded random values that no one holds.

On the first boot of your VM, the first boot service sets a fresh per-VM administrator password and a fresh per-VM database password. Only then is Apache allowed to serve a request, so there is never a window in which a default or shared credential is reachable.

Confirm the security posture on the VM:

sudo bash /usr/local/sbin/omp-cred-roundtrip.sh

Expected output:

OK per-VM administrator authenticates via the PKP web login form; blank + weak guesses rejected

Step 9 - Verify the stack and where your data lives

The OMP application code lives on the OS disk under /var/www/omp. Your data lives on the dedicated 20 GiB Azure data disk mounted at /data: the MariaDB datadir is bind-mounted from /data/mysql onto /var/lib/mysql, and OMP's uploaded manuscript files (files_dir) live at /data/omp/files, outside the web root so that the web never serves them.

Check the health endpoint and the data mount:

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

Adding your own domain and TLS

The image derives OMP's base URL from the request, so as soon as you point a DNS name at the VM and browse it over HTTPS, OMP generates correct absolute links automatically. To terminate TLS on the VM, install a certificate with Certbot:

sudo apt-get install -y certbot python3-certbot-apache
sudo certbot --apache -d your-domain.example.com

When you adopt a fixed public domain, pin it in /var/www/omp/config.inc.php by setting base_url = "https://your-domain.example.com" and restricting allowed_hosts to that host. Then reload Apache.

If you enable OMP's scheduled tasks, such as review reminders, set base_url to your real domain first, because the scheduler needs a concrete base URL.

Backing up

Your data is the MariaDB database and the files_dir tree. Back up the database with mysqldump and archive the files directory:

sudo mariadb-dump --single-transaction omp | gzip > /data/omp-db-backup.sql.gz
sudo tar czf /data/omp-files-backup.tar.gz -C /data/omp files

Copy both backups off the VM on a schedule, for example to Azure Blob Storage.

Security notes

• The bundled MariaDB listens on 127.0.0.1 only, and port 3306 is never exposed. Keep your NSG limited to 22, 80 and 443.
• The administrator password is unique per VM and written to a root-only file. There is no shipped default or shared login.
• OMP keeps uploaded manuscripts in files_dir outside the web root, and the Apache vhost denies config.inc.php, dotfiles and the application's library and tools directories from the web.
• Keep the OS patched with sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade. Unattended security upgrades remain enabled on the image.

Trademark

Open Monograph Press and OMP are products of the Public Knowledge Project. All product and company names are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective holders. Use of them does not imply any affiliation with or endorsement by them. This image is provided by SecureAnyCloud and is not affiliated with or endorsed by the Public Knowledge Project.

Support

This image is backed by 24/7 SecureAnyCloud support at sales@secureanycloud.com. We help with deployment, press and workflow configuration, upgrades, performance tuning and MariaDB database administration.

Deploy on Azure

Launch Open Monograph Press (OMP) 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