Hosting // Ghost

Ghost is a really cool blogging platform I discovered several years ago. I have been toying with the platform for a while, but only in the past couple years have I really started to take it seriously. I had used Wordpress before and for other projects, but for many cases I dislike the setup and configuration of Wordpress to do simple things or just to get information out there. Ghost helped a lot to solve some issues I had with Wordpress and made it feel more enjoyable to blog.

Setting up a Ghost site in the past took me a lot of time and configuration. In recent years I had finally decided to start learning docker and I had come to learn that there is a docker image for Ghost. To keep up with my current trend, I decided to host my Ghost sites myself using docker. Doing so was actually very easy! Setting up the docker compose configuration was very simple.

networks:
  ghost_net:
    external: false
services:
  ghost:
    image: ghost:latest
    container_name: ghost
    volumes:
      - /DATA/AppData/ghost/config.production.json:/var/lib/ghost/config.production.json:z #overwrite default settings 
      - /DATA/AppData/ghost/content/:/var/lib/ghost/content:z
    ports:
      - 2360:2360
    environment: # this section can be commented to start in dev mode by default
      - NODE_ENV=production # set either production or development, then it will load the respective config
      - GHOST_CONTENT=/var/lib/ghost/content
      - GHOST_INSTALL=/var/lib/ghost
      - PATH=/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/bin
    restart: always
    networks:
      - ghost_net

After deploying Ghost using my docker-compose config, it will only be accessible through your local network. You will need to configure Ghost to help expose it to the internet and pair it to a domain. Ghost does require email to be setup for production use however. You can use your own Google account for this (application credentials only) or make a new email on your domain for it and put those credentials instead.

{
  "url": "https://your-domain.com",
  "server": {
    "port": 2360,
    "host": "0.0.0.0"
  },
  "database": {
  "client": "sqlite3",
  "connection": {
    "filename": "content/data/ghost.db"
  },
  "useNullAsDefault": true,
  "debug": false
  },
 "mail": {
     "transport": "SMTP",
      "options": {
        "service": "Google",
        "host": "smtp.gmail.com",
        "port": 587,
        "auth": {
          "user": "your-smtp-user",
          "pass": "your-smtp-password"
        }
    }
  },
  "logging": {
    "transports": [
      "stdout"
    ]
  },
  "paths": {
    "contentPath": "/var/lib/ghost/content"
  }
}

Once you have configured Ghost, and restarted it you will just need to configure your reverse proxy. Using a reverse proxy like Caddy we can configure our Ghost site adding the following to our Caddyfile.

#Caddyfile
your-domain.com {
  reverse_proxy ghost-ip-or-hostname:2360
}

After applying your new Caddy config your should now have a publicly accessible blog using Ghost! Happy blogging!