Install Ghost CMS with Ghost-CLI

What is Ghost?

Ghost is an open source blogging platform that helps you easily create a professional-looking online blog. Ghost is a robust content management system (CMS) with a Markdown editor, an easy-to-use user interface, and beautiful themes. It is easy to install and update with Ghost-CLI.

To install Ghost CMS you need a supported version of Node.js. Check the supported Node versions by Ghost. With Node.js installed we get npm which is a package manager.

We will be using Ubuntu 18.04 in this guide. Any Ubuntu version should work with no issues.

So, let’s start!

Install Ghost-CLI

Ghost CLI is a command line tool provided by the Ghost team to help with installing and configuring Ghost. To install the CLI run the following command:

npm install [email protected] -g

Now we can use ghost command. Some ghost commands that are available:

• ghost install
• ghost update
• ghost setup
• ghost config
• ghost start
• ghost stop

You can run ghost help to see all available commands.

Install Ghost locally

To install Ghost locally just create a new directory and navigate to it. Then run the following command:

ghost install local

This will setup a Ghost instance in development mode (which is good for developing or changing a theme as it uses less caching)

When the install is finished the Ghost instance should automatically be started. You can access it by this url: http://localhost:2368 To access the ghost admin go to this url http://localhost:2368/ghost

Useful commands to manage your local ghost instance

• ghost start – To start Ghost
• ghost stop – To stop Ghost
• ghost restart – To restart Ghost

The database is automatically setup during the install and can be found in the content/data folder. While themes are in the content/themes folder.

Install Ghost on server

To install Ghost on a server there is a recommended way to do it. You should create a directory for it:

# create directory
sudo mkdir -p /var/www/ghost_site

Your user has to own this directory and have the correct permissions for it. Run these commands and replace <user> with your actual user:

#set ownership
sudo chown <user>:<user> /var/www/ghost_site

#set permissions
sudo chmod 775 /var/www/ghost_site

Now you can install Ghost:

# move to the directory
cd /var/www/ghost_site

# run the install command
ghost install

Install Configuration

During the install you will be prompted to complete some information needed by the CLI to configure your site:

• Blog URL – your site url
• MySQL hostname – localhost by default
• MySQL user & password
• Database name – how you want to name the db
• Ghost MySQL user – yes/no (recommended)
• nginx setup – yes/no (recommended)
• SSL setup – yes/no (recommended) to have https
• email
• systemd setup – yes/no (recommended)

Once all of the above has been configured you are good to go. All setup and ready to start publishing!