A few months ago I started playing with Ghost the blogging platform. I ended up not using it (I’m using Jekyll now) but I think this notes can be useful for people trying it out.
The documentation section of the Ghost website is quite complete but I have found the articles at howtoinstallghost.com better at identifying problems and suggesting solutions.
So, these are the steps I followed:
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Create a EC2 instance in AWS -> I followed this tutorial that shows how to install Ghost on an Amazon EC2 instance using the Free Tier. It was really easy to follow but I have a couple of things to note:
- Everything needs to be done with
sudo - You will need to use absolute paths to call npm. For instance:
/usr/local/bin/npm install - There is another tutorial that uses a pre-build AMI with Ghost already installed. However that AMI doesn’t seem to be available anymore.
- Everything needs to be done with
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Now you have a Ghost instance running on the cloud but the moment you close the terminal or switch off your laptop the process will stop, so you need to figure out how to make Ghost run forever. This article will tell you how.
When I first tried to run forever the system couldn’t find node (even though I installed in the previous step). Thankfully I wasn’t the only one facing this problem and I solved it by reading this which just tell you how to link the missing files.
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Finally, make sure you have backup of your content. This article will tell you how.