Difficulty: Easy
Estimated Cloudlet Usage: 3-5
Ghost is a popular CMS that lets you create a blog or newsletter. If you are interested in using Ghost, we do have a Reclaim Cloud Marketplace installer that will help you get set up quickly.
Installing Ghost
You can get started by clicking on Marketplace in the top toolbar of the Reclaim Cloud dashboard. You'll find Ghost by navigating to the Content Management category or searching by name.
After clicking the Install button, you can choose an environment URL (which serves as the URL of Ghost until you choose to map a domain name). You can also choose to give the environment a custom Display Name in your dashboard (this Display Name is only visible to you, and is primarily for organization purposes), as well as choose the region you want to run Ghost in.
Click Install when you are ready. The install process will take a few minutes as Reclaim Cloud creates the environment, assigns an IP address, and installs Ghost.
Once Ghost is installed and ready to go, you'll see a confirmation message:
At this point, you will want to visit your Ghost install's admin URL to complete the setup of your site and create a username and password. You can click on the URL in the confirmation dialog, by adding /ghost to the end of your install's URL.
Updating and Configuring Ghost
There are several Add-Ons available to automate common tasks:
Update Ghost and MySQL
Ghost will not update on its own, but you can use the Update Ghost Add-On for the Ghost server node to bring Ghost and MySQL up to date with the latest stable version.
Map a Custom Domain
You will likely want to map a custom Domain to your Ghost blog. To do this, find the environment's IP address by using the drop-down arrows:
Next, you will want to point an A record at the IP address. Here is what that would look like using the DNS Zone Editor in cPanel:
Finally, use the Domain Configuration Add-On to tell ghost to use the new domain name.
Setup Email and Mailgun to send Newsletters from Ghost
Ghost has built-in support for sending newsletters using Mailgun as a bulk email service. Our installer has an addon that makes it easy to set up SMTP (which handles transactional mail like password resets) and the Ghost administration interface has settings to configure Mailgun for sending newsletters.
After setting up your Ghost blog and Mailgun account, you can enter your Mailgun details using the Mail Setup Add-on.
Note that you set up SMTP accounts in Mailgun by logging in there and going to Settings > Domain Settings > SMTP Credentials.
Once transactional mail is set up via SMTP, you can follow Ghost's official instructions to set up the Mailgun API for newsletters.
Technical Details
This Ghost installer automated the setup of the official ghost-docker repository to run Ghost, set up a MySQL database, and handle HTTPS automatically using Caddy. You can find all relevant files for your Ghost install in the /root/ghost path of your Ghost server node. You can browse these files via SFTP, or by using Reclaim Cloud's config panel:
If you don't want to use the Add-Ons above to update your Ghost install, you can also use commands via the terminal to do so. First connect to the node via SSH, or by using the Web SSH Panel:
This installer is designed to set up very similarly to Ghost's official self hosting instructions, so for troubleshooting or any advanced setup, you can refer to their official documentation.
Next, read through our guide on Managing Redirects in Ghost.