Running Ghost on Reclaim Cloud

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.

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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. 

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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.

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Once Ghost is installed and ready to go, you'll see a confirmation message:

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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.

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Updating and Configuring Ghost

There are several Add-Ons available to automate common tasks:

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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:

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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:

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Finally, use the Domain Configuration Add-On to tell ghost to use the new domain name.

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Setup Mailgun to send Newsletters from Ghost

Ghost has built-in support for sending newsletters using Mailgun as a bulk email service. 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.

Technical Details

This Ghost installer uses several Docker containers to run Ghost, set up a MySQL database, and handle HTTPS automatically using NGINX and Let's Encrypt. 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:

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If you don't want to use the Add-Ons above to update your ghost install, you can also use Docker commands via the terminal to do so. First connect to the node via SSH, or by using the Web SSH Panel:

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Then you would run these commands to update, then restart the Docker containers:

cd /root/ghost
docker-compose pull
docker-compose down
docker-compose up -d

You can also use the terminal to view the logs of all running containers, which can be handy if you are troubleshooting a problem with your Ghost install:

cd /root/ghost
docker-compose logs -f

Next, read through our guide on Managing Redirects in Ghost

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