Ghost Self-Hosted Installation and Setup

Ghost Self-Hosted Installation and Setup

Ghost self-hosted deploys via official CLI on Ubuntu. Minimum requirements: 1 CPU core, 1 GB RAM (2 GB recommended), Ubuntu 20.04/22.04, Node.js 18.x, MySQL 8.

Server Preparation

# System update
sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade -y

# Node.js 18 via NodeSource
curl -fsSL https://deb.nodesource.com/setup_18.x | sudo -E bash -
sudo apt install -y nodejs

# MySQL 8
sudo apt install -y mysql-server
sudo mysql_secure_installation

# Nginx
sudo apt install -y nginx

# Ghost CLI
sudo npm install -g ghost-cli@latest

MySQL setup:

CREATE USER 'ghost'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'strongpassword';
CREATE DATABASE ghost_prod CHARACTER SET utf8mb4 COLLATE utf8mb4_unicode_ci;
GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON ghost_prod.* TO 'ghost'@'localhost';
FLUSH PRIVILEGES;

Ghost Installation

sudo mkdir -p /var/www/ghost
sudo chown $(whoami):$(whoami) /var/www/ghost
cd /var/www/ghost

ghost install \
  --url https://myblog.com \
  --db mysql \
  --dbhost localhost \
  --dbuser ghost \
  --dbpass strongpassword \
  --dbname ghost_prod \
  --process systemd \
  --mail SMTP \
  --mailhost smtp.mailgun.org \
  --mailport 587 \
  --mailssl true \
  --mailuser [email protected] \
  --mailpass mailgunpassword \
  --mail-from [email protected]

Ghost CLI auto-configures Nginx virtual host and requests SSL via Certbot.

Useful Management Commands

ghost status          # service status
ghost stop / start    # stop/start
ghost restart         # restart
ghost update          # update to latest version
ghost log             # view logs
ghost config          # edit config.production.json
ghost backup          # create backup (zip with content and files)

Custom Configuration

// /var/www/ghost/config.production.json
{
  "url": "https://myblog.com",
  "database": {
    "client": "mysql2",
    "connection": { "host": "localhost", "user": "ghost", "password": "...", "database": "ghost_prod" }
  },
  "mail": {
    "transport": "SMTP",
    "options": { "host": "smtp.mailgun.org", "port": 587, "auth": { "user": "...", "pass": "..." } }
  },
  "storage": {
    "active": "s3",
    "s3": {
      "accessKeyId": "...",
      "secretAccessKey": "...",
      "bucket": "myblog-media",
      "region": "eu-west-1",
      "assetHost": "https://cdn.myblog.com"
    }
  },
  "imageOptimization": { "resize": true, "srcsets": true },
  "privacy": { "useUpdateCheck": true, "useGravatar": false }
}

Installation and basic setup on prepared VPS — 2–4 hours.