Ghost is an open source blogging platform that is gaining popularity among developers and ordinary users since its 2013 release. It puts focus on content and blogging. The most attractive thing about Ghost is its simple, clean, and responsive design. You can write your blog posts from a mobile phone. Content for Ghost is written using the Markdown language.
In this guide we are going to set up and deploy a secure Ghost blog on an CentOS 7 VPS using Let's Encrypt, Node.js and Nginx.
Before starting this step, ensure that you have set DNS records for your domain.
We are going to use Let's Encrypt Certificate Authority and its Certbot client to obtain TLS certificates for our Ghost blog. Don't forget to replace all instances of example.com
with your domain name.
Update system:
yum check-update && yum update
Install development tools:
yum groupinstall -y 'Development Tools'
Enable the EPEL (Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux) repository.
# Certbot is packaged in EPEL (Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux). To use Certbot, you must first enable the EPEL repository.
yum install -y epel-release
Install Certbot (a.k.a Let's Encrypt client):
yum install -y certbot
Check version:
certbot --version
# certbot 0.9.3
Obtain certificate:
certbot certonly -d example.com -d www.example.com --email john.doe@mail.com --agree-tos --standalone
After going through previous steps, your certificate and private key will be in the /etc/letsencrypt/live/example.com
directory.
Ghost currently supports Node versions 0.12.x, 4.2+, and 6.9+ only.
We are going to install recommended version for Ghost which is Node v4.x argon LTS
at the time of this writing.
Download and install the LTS version of Node.js:
curl --silent --location https://rpm.nodesource.com/setup_4.x | bash -
yum --disablerepo "*" --enablerepo "nodesource" install -y nodejs
Check Node and NPM version:
node -v && npm -v
# v4.7.2
# 2.15.11
Run vi /etc/yum.repos.d/nginx.repo
and copy/paste the below directives and save and exit:
[nginx]
name=nginx repo
baseurl=https://nginx.org/packages/mainline/centos/7/$basearch/
gpgcheck=0
enabled=1
Download and install Nginx:
yum install -y nginx
Check Nginx version:
nginx -v
# nginx version: nginx/1.11.8
Start Nginx process and check status:
systemctl start nginx
systemctl status nginx
Configure Nginx as a reverse proxy:
vi /etc/nginx/conf.d/ghost.conf
Add the following to /etc/nginx/conf.d/ghost.conf
:
server {
listen 80;
listen [::]:80;
listen 443 ssl http2;
listen [::]:443 ssl http2;
server_name example.com www.example.com;
ssl_certificate /etc/letsencrypt/live/example.com/fullchain.pem;
ssl_certificate_key /etc/letsencrypt/live/example.com/privkey.pem;
ssl_protocols TLSv1 TLSv1.1 TLSv1.2;
location / {
proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
proxy_set_header Host $http_host;
proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-Proto $scheme;
proxy_pass http://127.0.0.1:2368;
}
}
Check syntax:
nginx -t
Restart Nginx:
systemctl restart nginx
If you want to host multiple Ghost blogs on same VPS, each Ghost instance must be running on a separate port.
Make webroot
directory:
mkdir -p /var/www/
Create a Ghost user:
useradd -c "Ghost Application" ghost
Download and install Ghost:
cd /var/www
wget https://ghost.org/zip/ghost-latest.zip
unzip ghost-latest.zip -d ghost
chown -R ghost:ghost /var/www/ghost/
rm ghost-latest.zip
Switch to the ghost
user:
su - ghost
Install Ghost:
cd /var/www/ghost
npm install --production
Configure Ghost by changing url
property of production
object inside of config.js
file:
cp config.example.js config.js
vi config.js
config = {
// ### Production
// When running Ghost in the wild, use the production environment.
// Configure your URL and mail settings here
production: {
url: 'https://example.com',
...
}
...
...
Save config.js
file and exit.
Start Ghost:
npm start --production
Ghost will now be running. Both blog front-end and admin interface are secured with HTTPS and HTTP/2 is working also. You can open your browser and visit site at https://example.com
. Don't forget to replace example.com
with your domain name.
If you close your terminal session with your VPS, your blog will also go down. That's not good. To avoid this, we are going to use the Forever process manager. That will keep our blog up 24/7.
Switch to ghost
user if you are not:
su - ghost
Go to ghost
folder
cd /var/www/ghost
Install Forever process manager:
npm install forever
Add the new forever
command to your path:
echo "export PATH=/var/www/ghost/node_modules/forever/bin:$PATH" >> ~/.bashrc
source ~/.bashrc
Start Ghost with forever:
NODE_ENV=production /var/www/ghost/node_modules/forever/bin/forever start index.js
At this point, forever
should have started Ghost.
Go to https://example.com/ghost
and create a Ghost admin account. Do this as soon as possible. To check running version of Ghost go to https://example.com/ghost/about/
after creating admin account.
That's it. We now have a fully functional Ghost blog. If you want to change the default Ghost theme called Casper to a custom one, you can just download and unzip the theme into the /var/www/ghost/content/themes
folder and select it via Ghost admin interface, located at https://example.com/ghost
.
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