Ghost blogging platform was released to public on Oct 14, 2013. It’s a nodejs app, that was started out as a kickstarter.

Since it’s out for public download, I tried to deploy it on a droplet from Digital Ocean running Ubuntu 13.04.

Firstly, Ubuntu repository does not have the latest version of nodejs. Ghost requires nodejs later than 0.8, while nodejs in Ubuntu is 0.68. I had to install nodejs from ppa and later proxy though my current nginx server.

These are the steps required to make it work:

(Initial requirement is that you already have nginx server setup and running).

1. SSH into your machine and download the file from https://en.ghost.org/download.
2. Unzip the file into a directory.
3. Then run npm install --production (If you don’t have the latest version of npm, it will throw errors)
4. In your nginx server definition, add this location:

    location / {  
      proxy_pass http://127.0.0.1:2368;
      proxy\_set\_header Host $host;
      proxy_buffering off;  
    }

5. Then re-start your nginx and from the Ghost installation directory run “npm start”
6. You should see something like this, if everything is okay:

  npm start
> ghost@0.3.2 start /home/msoe/public_html/ghost
> node index

Ghost is running...
Listening on 127.0.0.1:2368
Url configured as: http://my-ghost-blog.com
Ctrl+C to shut down

7. Now try to access, through your nginx server. You should start seeing console is logging requests coming in.

This document is based on Ghost’s deployment guide.