Installing Ghost

Overview

Ghost is a gorgeous blogging platform supported on Developer+ accounts on v6+ platforms. Ghost requires terminal access to deploy and hooks into Passenger affording simple process management.

Basic layout from a fresh Ghost install

Quickstart

This guide is designed to get Ghost up and running with the fewest steps. Ghost will be SQLite as a database backend, but you might want to configure it to take advantage of MySQL’s improved throughput.

1. Login to the terminal
2. Create a subdomain to serve Ghost. Since it’s launched with Passenger, you will need to make a Passenger-compatible filesystem layout

   • cd /var/www
     mkdir -p ghost/{tmp,public}
     cd ghost

3. Download Ghost from ghost.org. At the time of writing, 0.6.4 is the latest version:

   • wget https://ghost.org/zip/ghost-0.6.4.zip
     unzip ghost-0.6.4.zip
     rm -f ghost-0.6.4.zip

4. Ghost has been downloaded and extracted to /var/www/ghost. Ghost is a Node.js application that relies on third-party dependencies to run. These can be installed used the Node.js package manager (npm)
   • Install missing dependencies:

     npm install --production 

5. Connect public/ to a subdomain within the control panel under Web > Subdomains
   
   

   Connecting Ghost to a subdomain within the control panel

6. Create a .htaccess control file in public/ and set PassengerNodejs to inform the web server that this is a Node.js application to be launched with Passenger. `which node` is shorthand to resolve the location of your Node interpreter as selected by nvm:

   • echo "PassengerNodejs `which node`" >> public/.htaccess

7. Create a MySQL database. Ghost connects over TCP socket, so ensure that remote permissions on 127.0.0.1 are granted to the user. By default, when a user is created, permissions are only granted to “localhost” and not 127.0.0.1.
8. Edit core/server/config/env/config.production.json with your database credentials. Change user, password, and database fields.

   • nano core/server/config/env/config.production.json

9. Populate the database

   • env NODE_ENV=production knex-migrator init

10. Finally, Passenger expects the entry-point to be named “app.js“. Ghost uses index.js as its startup file. Create a symbolic link from index.js to app.js to satisfy Passenger:

    • ln -s index.js app.js

11. Once done, access /signup on the subdomain to setup your admin account
    • For example, in this walkthrough, the URL on ghost.example.com would be http://ghost.example.com/ghost
12. Enjoy!
    

    Ghost administrative dialog after setup

Odds and Ends

Restarting

Node.js piggybacks Passenger, and in doing so, can be easily restarted using the tmp/ control directory. Follow the general guide to restarting a Passenger-backed application.

See also

• Ghost Website
• Ghost Configuration
• Ghost Documentation: Getting Started
• Example Ghost installation on a v6 platform