Restarting Ghost

Since a new Ghost version is available for download I figured it was time to upgrade this blog. There was just a itsy bitsy tiny miny problem: I had forgotten my root password for the Digital Ocean droplet hosting this blog. This itself was not a huge deal, it's very easy to reset your root password and this time I made sure this sort of situation won't happen again.

The problem began when I realized the password reset also restarted my server and nothing worked anymore... With me being a beginner in terms of Ghost, server stuff and Linux, I ended up with a real mess to fix. Fortunately, I managed to get the blog up and running and for future reference, as well as to help others, here's some useful info.

Help! I restarted the server and now Ghost doesn't work anymore!

First thing you need to do after a droplet is restarted is to make sure Nginx works. In my case, I had to restart it:

$ sudo service nginx restart

Now the Chrome error page turned into an Nginx error page so I was halfway there.

Second, you also need to start the ghost process. Using cd, work up your way to the ghost install folder and once there, start the process and make sure it's in production mode:

npm start --production

After this everything should be like it was before! Crysis averted!