geek-cookbook/manuscript/recipes/ghost.md

hero: Ghost - A recipe for beautiful online publication.

Ghost

Ghost is "a fully open source, hackable platform for building and running a modern online publication."

Ingredients

!!! summary "Ingredients" Existing:

1. [X] [Docker swarm cluster](/ha-docker-swarm/design/) with [persistent shared storage](/ha-docker-swarm/shared-storage-ceph.md)
2. [X] [Traefik](/ha-docker-swarm/traefik_public) configured per design
3. [X] DNS entry for the hostname you intend to use, pointed to your [keepalived](ha-docker-swarm/keepalived/) IP

Preparation

Setup data locations

Create the location for the bind-mount of the application data, so that it's persistent:

mkdir -p /var/data/ghost

Setup Docker Swarm

Create a docker swarm config file in docker-compose syntax (v3), something like this:

!!! tip I share (with my patreon patrons) a private "premix" git repository, which includes necessary docker-compose and env files for all published recipes. This means that patrons can launch any recipe with just a git pull and a docker stack deploy 👍

version: '3'

services:
  ghost:
    image: ghost:1-alpine
    volumes:
     - /etc/localtime:/etc/localtime:ro
     - /var/data/ghost/:/var/lib/ghost/content
    networks:
    - traefik_public
    deploy:
      labels:
        - traefik.frontend.rule=Host:ghost.example.com
        - traefik.docker.network=traefik
        - traefik.port=2368

networks:
  traefik_public:
    external: true

Serving

Launch Ghost stack

Launch the Ghost stack by running docker stack deploy ghost -c <path -to-docker-compose.yml>

Create your first administrative account at https://YOUR-FQDN/admin/

Chef's Notes 📓

1. If I wasn't committed to a static-site-generated blog, Ghost is the platform I'd use for my blog.
2. A default using the SQlite database takes 548k of space:

[root@ds1 ghost]# du -sh /var/data/ghost/
548K	/var/data/ghost/
[root@ds1 ghost]#