Plotly Dash on Ubuntu 24.04 on Azure User Guide

Overview

Plotly Dash is the popular open source Python framework for building interactive, data-driven web applications and analytical dashboards without writing any JavaScript. You describe a dashboard's layout and its interactive behaviour entirely in Python — Plotly charts, controls such as dropdowns, sliders and date pickers, and callbacks that recompute the charts and tables whenever a user changes an input — and Dash serves it as a browsable analytics application that updates live in the browser.

The cloudimg image ships Dash as a finished, ready-to-run dashboard server, not a bare framework. It installs Dash 4.4.0 with Plotly 6.9.0 and pandas 2.2.3 in a Python virtual environment at /opt/plotly-dash/venv on Python 3.12, run by an unprivileged plotlydash system account. A substantive sample dashboard — the Global Development Explorer — is bundled and live on the first boot of every VM: a Plotly bubble chart, a ranked bar chart and a data table driven by a metric dropdown, a region dropdown and a year slider over the Gapminder development-indicators dataset. It is served in production by gunicorn (three workers, the WSGI app.server) on the loopback address 127.0.0.1:5000 — not the Flask development server — and fronted by nginx on TCP 80 with HTTP Basic Authentication. A unique admin password is generated on the first boot of every VM. Backed by 24/7 cloudimg support.

The dashboard listens only on loopback and is never exposed directly. nginx fronts it on port 80; the unauthenticated /health probe stays open for load balancers, and everything else requires the admin password.

What is included:

• Dash 4.4.0 + Plotly 6.9.0 + pandas 2.2.3 in a Python 3.12 venv at /opt/plotly-dash, run by an unprivileged plotlydash account
• A bundled, genuinely interactive sample dashboard at /opt/plotly-dash/app/dashboard.py (the Global Development Explorer)
• gunicorn serving the Dash WSGI app in production on loopback :5000, managed by plotly-dash.service
• nginx reverse proxy on :80 with HTTP Basic Auth in front of the dashboard; open /health probe
• Per-VM admin password generated at first boot, in a root-only file
• plotly-dash.service + nginx.service as systemd units, enabled and active
• 24/7 cloudimg support

Prerequisites

An active Azure subscription, an SSH key pair, and a VNet + subnet in the target region. Standard_B2s (2 vCPU / 4 GiB RAM) is a good starting point; scale up for heavier dashboards or more concurrent users. NSG inbound: allow 22/tcp from your management network and 80/tcp from the browsers that reach the dashboard (front port 80 with TLS for public exposure — see Enabling HTTPS).

Step 1 — Deploy from the Azure Marketplace

Sign in to the Azure Portal, choose Create a resource, search the Marketplace for Plotly Dash by cloudimg, 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) and HTTP (80). Then Review + create → Create.

Step 2 — Deploy from the Azure CLI

az vm create \
  --resource-group <your-rg> \
  --name plotly-dash \
  --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 plotly-dash --port 80 --priority 1010

Step 3 — Connect to your VM

ssh azureuser@<vm-public-ip>

Step 4 — Confirm the services are running

systemctl is-active plotly-dash.service nginx.service
curl -s http://127.0.0.1/health

Both services report active and the /health endpoint returns ok. The dashboard is served by gunicorn on loopback 127.0.0.1:5000 and reached only through nginx on port 80.

Step 5 — Retrieve your admin password

The password is generated uniquely on the first boot of your VM and written to a root-only file:

sudo cat /root/plotly-dash-credentials.txt

The DASH_ADMIN_PASSWORD value is the password; sign in as admin with it. Without credentials the dashboard returns 401; with them it returns 200.

Step 6 — Open the dashboard

Browse to http://<vm-public-ip>/ and sign in as admin with the password from Step 5. The bundled Global Development Explorer loads immediately: a Plotly bubble chart of life expectancy versus GDP per capita, with summary tiles above it.

Step 7 — Explore interactively

The dashboard is genuinely interactive — every control fires a Dash callback that recomputes the charts server-side and updates them live. Change the Region dropdown to a single continent and the bubble chart filters to that region and its title updates:

Drag the Year slider back to 1952 and the same chart redraws with the historical data — life expectancy and GDP per capita were far lower:

Step 8 — The ranked view

Scroll down for the ranked bar chart and the top-10 data table, both driven by the same Metric, Region and Year controls:

Step 9 — Confirm the runtime and interactivity

Confirm the pinned versions and that the app is served by gunicorn in production:

for p in dash plotly pandas gunicorn; do printf '%-10s %s\n' "$p" "$(/opt/plotly-dash/venv/bin/pip show $p | awk '/^Version:/{print $2}')"; done

This prints dash 4.4.0, plotly 6.9.0, pandas 2.2.3 and gunicorn 23.0.0. You can also exercise the interactive callback endpoint directly with the admin credentials — two different inputs return two different figures, which is the proof the dashboard reacts to input:

PASS=$(sudo grep '^DASH_ADMIN_PASSWORD=' /root/plotly-dash-credentials.txt | cut -d= -f2-)
curl -s -o /dev/null -w 'authenticated dashboard: HTTP %{http_code}\n' -u "admin:$PASS" http://127.0.0.1/
curl -s -u "admin:$PASS" http://127.0.0.1/_dash-layout | head -c 80; echo

Ship your own dashboard

The image is a production Dash host — replace the bundled sample with your own application. Edit /opt/plotly-dash/app/dashboard.py (or drop in your own module and point gunicorn at it), keeping a module-level server = app.server so gunicorn can serve it, then restart:

sudo -u plotlydash /opt/plotly-dash/venv/bin/pip install <your-extra-packages>
sudo systemctl restart plotly-dash.service

The systemd unit runs gunicorn --workers 3 --bind 127.0.0.1:5000 dashboard:server from /opt/plotly-dash/app; adjust the worker count or module name in /etc/systemd/system/plotly-dash.service to match your app, then sudo systemctl daemon-reload && sudo systemctl restart plotly-dash.service. Pass environment variables to your app via /etc/plotly-dash/plotly-dash.env.

Enabling HTTPS

For production, terminate TLS at nginx with a real domain pointed at the VM's public IP. Install certbot and request a certificate (replace the domain):

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install -y certbot python3-certbot-nginx
sudo certbot --nginx -d your-domain.example.com

certbot edits the nginx site at /etc/nginx/sites-available/cloudimg-plotly-dash to add the TLS listener and arranges automatic renewal.

Backup and maintenance

The admin password lives in the nginx htpasswd file /etc/nginx/.plotly-dash.htpasswd; rotate it with sudo htpasswd /etc/nginx/.plotly-dash.htpasswd admin. Your dashboard code and any data live under /opt/plotly-dash/app; back that up if you customise it. Keep the OS patched with sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade (unattended security upgrades are enabled by default). The server restarts cleanly with sudo systemctl restart plotly-dash.service; logs: sudo journalctl -u plotly-dash.service.

Support

This image is backed by 24/7 cloudimg support. Contact us by email and chat for help with building and serving Dash dashboards, production tuning, authentication, TLS and maintenance.

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