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Setup a Ghost blog on VPS – Step by Step Guide

Omer Iqbal
Ghost is a free, open-source professional publishing platform for making blogs. The main idea behind Ghost is to make a simple blogging platform without those extra un-used features. If you only want a simple blog which has a well-designed interface and is fast, go with Ghost.
If you want something complex like an eCommerce site or something like that, then It’d be better to go with WordPress.
Ghost uses Node.js for the back-end. This is the reason It is very fast. More on Ghost vs WordPress here.
Ghost has two versions:
Starting a Ghost (pro) is very simple. You just have to visit the website, make an account, pay the price (there’s a 14-day trial as well) and your blog will be ready.
For a self-hosted version, you’ll need a server. You won’t be able to run Ghost on shared hostings as most of them don’t allow Node.js. Your best bet would be to get a $5 VPS from DigitalOcean or Vultr or Linode. This option would be cheap and great in performance.

 

The $5 VPS plan of all of the above 3 providers have almost the same specs
If you signup with DigitalOcean using this affiliate link, you’ll get $10 in DigitalOcean. DigitalOcean also provides Ghost as a one-click installation application. So you can just start a server, choose Ghost from one-click apps and your blog will be ready.

 

Ghost Requirements

Let’s take a look at Ghost official server setup requirements

 

Making a VPS

For the sake of this tutorial, we’re going to use Vultr. You can use any of the above mentioned VPS providers. Everything will almost be the same.

 

 

 

Setup DNS records

If you want to apply a domain to your new blog (I’m sure you will) then point your DNS to Vultr.
Go to your Domain Registrar and point your domain’s nameserver to Vultr’s.

 

Add Domain to your Server

Click on Servers in Vultr, then choose DNS.
Now click on Add Domain.
Enter your domain name and your server IP address (the server which you created in the first step). Click Add and your domain will be added to your server.

 

Setting up server

Now we need to SSH into our server and run some commands to install everything required.
Copy your server IP address and open terminal and paste the following in the terminal.
ssh root@X.X.X.X
Replace X.X.X.X with your server Ip address. The password to log in as root is available on your server setting page on Vultr.
If you’re using Windows, you can also use PuTTY to SSH into your server.

 

1. Add a non-root user

First of all, let’s create a new non-root user. Run the following commands on your server. Make sure to replace omer and Omer Iqbal with your username and Name.
adduser omer --gecos "Omer Iqbal"
usermod -aG sudo omer

su - omer

 

2. Update and Upgrade your server

Run the following command in your server
sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade -y

 

3. Install build-essential package

Run the following command to install build-essential package. It contains references to many tools like gcc compiler etc. which are needed by some npm packages.
sudo apt-get install build-essential -y

 

4. Install MySQL and Nginx

Next, we’re going to install MySQL and Nginx on our server.
For installing MySQL, run
sudo apt-get install mysql-server -y

 

While installing, It’ll ask you for the root password. Enter a strong password and remember It. We’ll need it while installing Ghost itself.
For installing Nginx, run
sudo apt-get install nginx -y

 

5. Install Node.js and NPM

Ghost official server requirements recommend >=6.9 <7.* (Node v6 boron LTS).
Although node version >=8.9 (Node v8 carbon LTS) is also supported.
Click here to check out Node supported versions by Ghost.

 

We’re going to install the recommended one. Run the following command
curl -sL https://deb.nodesource.com/setup_6.x | sudo -E bash -
and then
sudo apt-get install nodejs -y
Now we’ve successfully installed Node.js and NPM.

 

6. Installing Ghost-CLI

We’ll be using ghost-cli to install ghost on our server. It is the official program and configures everything for us.

 

Install ghost-cli using NPM.
sudo npm install ghost-cli@latest -g
This will install the latest ghost-cli globally (-g).
We’ll place ghost in the recommended installation location. Run the following command to make a new directory
sudo mkdir -p /var/www/ghost

 

Change the directory’s ownership to your user by running
sudo chown omer:omer /var/www/ghost

 

Make sure to replace omer with your own username.
Run the following command to give your full permissions to your user and read/execute for everyone else.
sudo chmod 775 /var/www/ghost

 

7. Installing Ghost

Now we’re at the final step of installing ghost. Navigate to  /var/www/ghost by running
cd /var/www/ghost
and run
ghost install

 

It’ll start to download and install Ghost for us.

 

After that, It’ll start asking us some questions. Answer them according to your needs.

 

? Enter your blog URL: https://example.com
? Enter your MySQL hostname: localhost
? Enter your MySQL username: root
? Enter your MySQL password: [hidden]
? Enter your Ghost database name: ghostdb
? 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) youremail@example.com
? Do you wish to set up Systemd? Yes
? Do you want to start Ghost? Yes 

 

Some important things to consider regarding the above questions:

 

 

Ghost is now installed and running.
Visit https://example.com/ghost to configure your user and start using your new blog.

 

 

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