Base
Hardened build
minimal ports, security patches applied at build time
DKAN Open Data Portal on Ubuntu 24.04 LTS
Azure
Analytics
DKAN, an open data portal and data catalog that publishes datasets with standards based metadata and serves their contents through a query API.
Overview
DKAN is an open source open data portal built on Drupal. It is the software an organisation runs when it needs to publish data to the public and be held to a standard while doing it: every dataset is described with DCAT metadata, so a catalog stays machine readable and can be crawled, aggregated and cited rather than being a folder of spreadsheets. Alongside the catalog it runs a datastore, which loads the tabular contents of a published file into a database and exposes it through a REST query API and a SQL endpoint, so an application or a notebook can read filtered, paged data directly instead of downloading whole files. Datasets are authored through a browser form driven by the metadata schema, with data dictionaries to declare the type and meaning of each column, and a harvester can pull an entire catalog from another portal on a schedule so a national or regional index stays in step with the sources that feed it. Because it is Drupal underneath, the catalog is also a website: pages, editorial workflow, roles and permissions, faceted search and theming all come from the platform rather than being rebuilt.
Why the cloudimg image
Every secret this appliance uses is generated on your own machine at first boot: the database password, the administrator password and the Drupal hash salt. That last one matters more than it sounds, because a salt shared between deployments would let a session or a one time login token minted on one instance be replayed against another, so cloudimg never bakes one into the image. The public listener is physically unable to answer before that has happened: Apache is gated on a bootstrap marker written only after the site is installed and every credential is in place, so there is no window in which an unconfigured portal is reachable. The build proves the whole pipeline runs rather than merely that a page loads, registering a sample catalog, importing it, and asserting the query API and the SQL endpoint both return real rows, then wipes every dataset, account, file and cached record and fails closed if any survives. MySQL never leaves loopback, settings.php is not world readable even though it holds the database password, and the private file directory sits outside the served tree. Ships fully patched with a paired deployment guide and 24/7 cloudimg support.
Common uses
- Publish an organisation's open data with DCAT metadata a catalog aggregator can read
- Serve tabular data to applications through a REST query API and a SQL endpoint
- Harvest and index catalogs from other portals to build a regional or national index
See it running
Real screenshots taken while testing this image against its deployment guide.
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