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 Ghost blog on an Debian 8.7 VPS using Let's Encrypt, Node.js and Nginx.
Before starting this step, ensure that you have set DNS records for your domain.
Update system:
apt update && apt upgrade -y
Install needed tools:
apt install -y zip build-essential
Enable the Jessie backports repo. Run apt edit-sources
and paste the below line at the end of /etc/apt/sources.list
file:
# Copy/Paste the below line at the end of file
deb http://ftp.debian.org/debian jessie-backports main
Refresh package sources:
apt update
Install Certbot (a.k.a Let's Encrypt client):
apt install -y certbot -t jessie-backports
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 the recommended version for Ghost which is v4 argon LTS
at the time of this writing.
Download and install the LTS version of Node.js:
curl -sL https://deb.nodesource.com/setup_4.x | sudo -E bash -
apt install -y nodejs
Check Node and NPM version:
node -v && npm -v
# v4.7.2
# 2.15.11
Download and install Nginx:
apt install nginx -t jessie-backports
Check the Nginx version:
nginx -v
# nginx version: nginx/1.9.10
Start Nginx service and check status:
systemctl start nginx
systemctl status nginx
Configure Nginx as a reverse proxy:
vi /etc/nginx/conf.d/ghost.conf
Paste the following in /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 $scheme;
proxy_pass http://127.0.0.1:2368;
}
}
Check syntax:
nginx -t
Reload Nginx:
systemctl reload nginx
If you want to host multiple Ghost blogs on the same VPS, each Ghost instance must be running on a separate port.
Make the webroot
directory:
mkdir -p /var/www/
Create a Ghost user:
adduser ghost
Download and install Ghost:
cd /var/www
wget https://ghost.org/zip/ghost-latest.zip
unzip ghost-latest.zip -d ghost
chown -R ghost:ghost /var/www/ghost/
rm ghost-latest.zip
Switch to the ghost
user:
su - ghost
Install Ghost:
cd /var/www/ghost
npm install --production
Configure Ghost by changing the url
property of the production
object inside of the config.js
file:
cp config.example.js config.js
vi config.js
config = {
// ### Production
// When running Ghost in the wild, use the production environment.
// Configure your URL and mail settings here
production: {
url: 'https://example.com',
...
}
...
...
NOTE: You should configure
Save config.js
file and exit.
Start Ghost:
npm start --production
Ghost is now running on your server. Both blog front-end and admin interface are secured with HTTPS and HTTP/2 is working also. You can open your browser and visit your site at https://example.com
. Don't forget to replace example.com
with your domain name.
If you close the terminal session to your VPS, your blog will also go down. That's not good. To avoid this, we are going to use the Forever process manager. That will keep your blog up 24/7.
Switch to the ghost
user:
su - ghost
Go to the /var/www/ghost
folder:
cd /var/www/ghost
Install Forever:
npm install forever
Add the new forever
command to your path:
echo "export PATH=/var/www/ghost/node_modules/forever/bin:$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.
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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