Coding with passion

How to get started with Ghost on Digital Ocean

Jens Neuhaus -

Why Ghost?

Ghost is an great option for your next blog or publication page. It is fully open source, offers a nice API and it has a marketplace for themes.

Installation from Marketplace

Installing Ghost is super-easy using the Digital Ocean Marketplace. Just search for Ghost or open the direct link.

Ghost Marketplace page

After clicking the button you will see the possible settings on a new page:

  • Standard plan is fine
  • Droplet size: Minimum requirement for Ghost is 1GB of RAM. According to this forum post using the minimum Digital ocean droplet size with 1GB of RAM for $5 a month should be fine if you are not having a decent amount of traffic yet.
  • Datacenter region: Choose a place next to your customers.
  • Select additional options: You can choose Monitoring, if you wish  -it does not come with any extra cost
  • For Authentication you should go with SSH Keys and either upload or create one.  
  • Choose 1 Droplet and pick a nice host name
  • Tags are optional, they help to organize your Droplets for a better overview

All set? Then click Create Droplet. Digital Ocean will do its work to set up your new, shiny instance:

Process of Droplet creation

It will do its work, it should take about a minute and then you have your new Droplet setup.

Your new Droplet is here!

The Dashboard will also show your IP. If you open it in a browser, Ghost welcomes you like this:

Before we go ahead, we must setup a domain and have our domain pointed to the IP. Go to your Domain / DNS registrar and enter the following data:

blog A <Your IP>

Login to your Droplet

Ghost tells us to log in with SSH to finish the configuration. Let's do this:

ssh root@<your droplet IP>

Ghosts then asks for two things after our login:

? Enter your blog URL: <https://blog.pixelpassion.io>
? Enter your email (For SSL Certificate) hello@pixelpassion.io

Ghost does some stuff and after it is done, you can go to <your domain>/ghost to finish the setup. You will be asked for your new admin credentials and then you can go ahead finishing the setup of your new blog.