Different and the same

If there’s one thing I miss about the old Wordpress blog it’s the simplicity in troubleshooting. Fixing any errors about the site usually required editing some .php files and then reloading the browser until everything turned out to be fine.

Today I tried to update my other Ghost blog to 0.6.2, to test out that new editor and boy, did I mess things up...

The previous update went really smooth, excepting the part where I forgot how to restart Ghost (that's embarassing, I know). The latest one however went completely different. I spent a couple of hours googling for solutions and trying to figure what went wrong.

I followed the Ghost upgrade instructions down to the letter but npm install --production had some issues and instead of the blog I got a 502 Bad Gateway error.

The good part is that a fresh install is really easy. After backing up the uploaded images and the theme, it was a simple case of delete, upload new content and run npm install --production again.

I did have to go back to /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/ and recover the correct port for the blog, in order to edit the Ghost's config.js file with the correct values.

With Forever already installed, I "turned the key", NODE_ENV=production forever start index.js and this time everything worked ok.

The Wordpress + PHP experience did seem different, simpler, but the hosting itself was also managed by the seller, and not by myself, like it is now with DigitalOcean. Who knows how things would have been with an unmanaged server?

But in the end it's still the same when you get down to the basics: you have an error and armed with your wits and Google, you start solving it step by step, SO question by SO question, reading the documentation piece by piece.

That's programming for you: always different and always the same