Ghost 1.0: Veni, vidi, updated

Bogdan BUCUR -

As some of you might know already, the blog engine Ghost just got a new and fancy Ghost 1.0 release. And since I'm a happy user of Ghost I took some time this weekend to make the jump myself. Although it's worth it (so far), it was not an easy process so for those who might be in need, I will document below my struggles.

First thing first, make sure you use the recommended stack:

  • Ubuntu 16.04
  • MySQL
  • NGINX
  • Systemd
  • Node v6 installed via NodeSource
  • At least 1GB memory (swap can be used)

I had Ubuntu 14.04 and went trough a painful couple of hours before finally giving up. However, once I updated my droplet (with the help of this DigitalOcean post: Can't upgrade from Ubuntu 14.04 to 16.04), everything went incredibily smooth. I would add that for me 1GB of RAM felt like plenty and the whole install process took much, much less than I expected.

The Ghost 1.0 Install & Setup doc page is surprisingly easy to follow, and in case you run into troubles the GhostCLI GitHub Issues page is also there to help you.

There is not much to say if you follow the official docs. The Ghost client is pretty nice and makes the install process very noob friendly.

I would have only one advice: before you begin simply rename the previous ghost instalation into _ghost or something similar.

mv /var/www/your-blog/ghost /var/www/your-blog/_ghost

In case something goes wrong, simply delete the new (and broken) ghost folder, restore the old one and you have your original blog up and running again.