Getting Started

Add BitNami Image

We have prepared several BitNami images for Windows Azure and will continue to release more. All BitNami images are listed in the Azure Community Portal VM Depot and in the Windows Azure web console.

You can manage all your Windows Azure resources via the WIndows Azure web console. To do so, go to https://manage.windowsazure.com and sign in with your Windows Azure login and password.

First, go to the "Virtual Machines" section and then "Images" tab" and click "Browse VMDepot" at the bottom of the page.

Select the BitNami image which you want to add to your Windows Azure Account. We choose WordPress in this tutorial. Each Windows Azure Image powered by BitNami has a detailed description of the included application. The listing also provides the default application login and password. Click "More" to show the image description.

Click OK. Now your new image (in our case "WordPress-3-5-0-Ubuntu-12-10") will show up in the Images section. Select it and click the "Register" button at the bottom. In the new pop-up window you will be able to choose the name for your image. Then click OK.

Launch your machine

Once the new image is added, click New in the left bottom corner. Select "Virtual Machine" and then "From Gallery" option. Go to "My Images" in the new pop-up window and select your new image:

Enter your machine name, login, password, instance type and DNS name in the machine configuration wizard.

Once the new machine wizard is completed, click "Virtual Machines" in the left menu, and select your new server. Wait till your machine is running.

Open network ports

This dashboard gives you an overview of all server attributes, possible operations and also allows you to modify your instance configuration.

We can check which network ports are open in the "Endpoints" section.

You need to add port 80 (HTTPS) here. Click "Add Endpoint" at the bottom of the page and fill in the form below:

Please note that it may take some time before the new port is available.

Access your application

Once your machine is running and port 80 (HTTP) is opened, you can enter its domain name in your web browser. In our example, it is mywordpress.cloudapp.net. You can find the domain in the main dashboard,

Click "Access my application" to get access to your WordPress application.

Please note that in most cases, the default application login and password are:

login: user

password: bitnami

You can find the default login and password in the Windows Azure VMDepot portal, in the Azure image description.

WARNING: Please login to your application immediately after launching your server and change the default password.

Connect to your machine

You have full control over your machine and you can connect to it with any SSH/SFTP/SCP client. The system account login and password were chosen with the server creation command. Learn more about how to connect to your server. Here is an example of SSH session for our demo machine below:

ssh wpuser@mywordpress.cloudapp.net
wpuser@mywordpress.cloudapp.net's password:

The programs included with the Ubuntu system are free software;
the exact distribution terms for each program are described in the
individual files in /usr/share/doc/*/copyright.

Ubuntu comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY, to the extent permitted by
applicable law.

Welcome to Ubuntu 12.10 (GNU/Linux 3.5.0-21-generic x86_64)
       ___ _ _   _  _            _ 
      | _ |_) |_| \| |__ _ _ __ (_)
      | _ \ |  _| .` / _` | '  \| |
      |___/_|\__|_|\_\__,_|_|_|_|_|

  *** Welcome to the BitNami WordPress 3.5-0 ***
  *** BitNami Wiki:   http://wiki.bitnami.com/ ***
  *** BitNami Forums: http://answers.bitnami.com/ ***
wpuser@my-wordpress:~$

wpuser@my-wordpress:~$ sudo /opt/bitnami/ctlscript.sh status 
apache already running
mysql already running
wpuser@my-wordpress:~$ sudo /opt/bitnami/ctlscript.sh restart
Syntax OK
/opt/bitnami/apache2/scripts/ctl.sh : httpd stopped
/opt/bitnami/mysql/scripts/ctl.sh : mysql stopped
130114 16:01:05 mysqld_safe Logging to '/opt/bitnami/mysql/data/mysqld.log'.
130114 16:01:06 mysqld_safe Starting mysqld.bin daemon with databases from /opt/bitnami/mysql/data
/opt/bitnami/mysql/scripts/ctl.sh : mysql  started at port 3306
Syntax OK
/opt/bitnami/apache2/scripts/ctl.sh : httpd started at port 80