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Installing Ghost CMS on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS

Updated by Linode Written by Linode

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Ghost is an open source blogging platform that helps you easily create a professional-looking online blog. Ghost is a robust content management system (CMS) with a Markdown editor, an easy-to-use user interface, and beautiful themes. It is easy to install and update with Ghost-CLI.

In This Guide

In this guide, you’ll set up, deploy, and secure a Ghost v3.5.1 blog on a Linode running Ubuntu 18.04 LTS, using NGINX, MySQL, Node.js, NPM, Ghost-CLI, and Let’s Encrypt. For installation instructions for other distributions, click here.

Note

This guide is written for a non-root user. Commands that require elevated privileges are prefixed with sudo. If you’re not familiar with the sudo command, consult our Users and Groups guide.

Replace each instance of example.com in this guide with your site’s domain name.

Before you Begin

  1. This guide assumes that you’ve followed the steps in our Getting Started and Securing Your Server guides and have created a new user for Ghost with elevated sudo privileges. The example username used in this guide is ghostexample.

  2. Ensure that you have a valid domain name and properly configured DNS records for your domain.

  3. Ensure that your system is up to date:

    sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade

  4. Install build-essential:

    sudo apt install build-essential

Install Prerequisites

Install NGINX

NGINX will be used as a reverse proxy for your Ghost application:

sudo apt install nginx

Install MySQL

  1. Download and install MySQL:

    sudo apt install mysql-server

  2. Log into MySQL:

    sudo mysql

  3. Set a password for the root user with this command, replacing password with a strong password:

    ALTER USER 'root'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED WITH mysql_native_password BY 'password';

  4. Exit MySQL:

    quit

Install Node.js and NPM

Ghost is built on Node.js and follows Node’s Long Term Support (LTS) plan. Ghost only supports LTS versions of Node.js.

Download and install Node.js:

curl -sL https://deb.nodesource.com/setup_10.x | sudo -E bash -
sudo apt install nodejs

Install and Configure Ghost

Install Ghost-CLI

Ghost-CLI is a command line interface (CLI) tool that makes installing and updating Ghost easy. It sets up the database, configures NGINX as a reverse proxy, enables TLS/SSL security using Let’s Encrypt CA, automatically renews your SSL, and initializes Ghost as a systemd service.

Install Ghost-CLI:

sudo npm install -g ghost-cli@latest

Install Ghost

Install Ghost using the Ghost-CLI tool.

  1. Create the document root directory:

    sudo mkdir -p /var/www/ghost

  2. Change ownership of the /var/www/ghost directory to the non-root user with sudo privileges that you created. In this example, ghostexample is our username:

    sudo chown ghostexample:ghostexample /var/www/ghost
sudo chmod 775 /var/www/ghost

  3. Navigate to the Ghost root directory:

    cd /var/www/ghost
    Note
    Installing Ghost in the /root or /home/{user} folder won’t work and results in a broken setup. Only use /var/www/{folder} because it has the correct permissions.

  4. Ensure that the directory is empty to avoid file conflicts:

    ls -a

  5. Install Ghost in production mode:

    ghost install

  6. Answer each question as prompted. For more information about each question, visit the Ghost documentation:

      
? Enter your blog URL: https://example.com
? Enter your MySQL hostname: localhost
? Enter your MySQL username: root
? Enter your MySQL password: thePasswordYouEnteredForRoot
? Enter your Ghost database name: exampleGhost
Configuring Ghost
Setting up instance

Setting up "ghost" system user
? Do you wish to set up "ghost" mysql user? yes
? Do you wish to set up Nginx? yes
? Do you wish to set up SSL? yes
? Enter your email (used for Let's Encrypt notifications) user@example.com
? Do you wish to set up Systemd? yes
? Do you want to start Ghost? yes

  7. After installation is complete, run ghost ls to view running Ghost processes:

    ghost ls

In the future when a newer version of Ghost is released, run ghost update from the /var/www/ghost directory to update to the newest version.

Complete the Setup

To complete the setup process, navigate to the Ghost configuration page by appending /ghost to the end of your blog’s URL or IP. This example uses https://example.com/ghost.

  1. On the welcome screen, click Create your account:

    Ghost Welcome Screen

  2. Enter your email, create a user, password, and blog title:

    Create Your Account Screen

  3. Invite additional members to your team. If you’d prefer to skip this step, click I’ll do this later, take me to my blog! at the bottom of the page.

    Invite Your Team Screen

  4. Navigate the Ghost admin area to create your first post, change your site’s theme, or configure additional settings:

    Ghost Admin Area

Troubleshooting

  1. Troubleshoot the system for any potential issues when installing or updating Ghost:

    ghost doctor

  2. Get help about Ghost:

    ghost --help

More Information

You may wish to consult the following resources for additional information on this topic. While these are provided in the hope that they will be useful, please note that we cannot vouch for the accuracy or timeliness of externally hosted materials.

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This guide is published under a CC BY-ND 4.0 license.