Ghost base

A Dockerized environment ready for developing and deploying Ghost applications.

Configuration

Start by copying the example config provided in the ./config/.dist folder to ./config/. Four files are provided:

config/.dist
├── config.development.json
├── config.production.json
├── development.env
└── production.env

You'll need to edit config/development.env and config/production.env and fill the missing values.

ghost-base $ cp config/.dist/* config/

ghost-base $ vim config/development.env
MYSQL_DATABASE=ghost_dev
MYSQL_USER=
MYSQL_PASSWORD=
MYSQL_ROOT_PASSWORD=
NODE_ENV=development
NPM_CONFIG_LOGLEVEL=debug

ghost-base $ vim config/production.env
MYSQL_DATABASE=ghost_prod
MYSQL_USER=
MYSQL_PASSWORD=
MYSQL_ROOT_PASSWORD=
NODE_ENV=production
NPM_CONFIG_LOGLEVEL=info

Note: This repo contains a .gitignore rule that will make sure that your config/*.env and config/*.json are not commited to Git as they contain sensitive information (database credentials).

Ghost Database(s)

For both the development and production environments described below Docker Volumes are used to persist the Ghost database.

Please be aware that stopping your blog with docker-compose down -v or by running a cleanup task such as docker system prune when your blog is stopped will result in the Docker Volumes above being removed. Make sure you backup!

Development environment

To start your Ghost blog in development mode, using nodemon in order to pick up changes automatically, run:

ghost-base $ docker-compose up ghost -d

This development environment is especially useful if you are making changes to a theme.

Your Ghost blog will now be running on http://localhost:12368/. Happy hacking.

To stop it do:

ghost-base $ docker-compose stop ghost

Production environment

Once you're happy with the changes to your theme it's now time to boot your app in production mode. Start by building the Docker image containing your blog files.

ghost-base $ docker-compose build ghost

Now start Ghost in production mode and use Nginx (web) as reverse proxy:

ghost-base $ docker-compose -f docker-compose.yml -f docker-compose.prod.yml up ghost -d

Your Ghost blog will now be running on http://localhost:2367/. Enjoy.

To stop it do:

ghost-base $ docker-compose -f docker-compose.yml -f docker-compose.prod.yml stop web

Bonus: Generate static content using Buster

By using Buster we can generate static content from a running Ghost instance and serve these files directly using something like GitHub Pages.

To generate static files and store them in build/buster do:

ghost-base $ docker-compose -f docker-compose.yml -f docker-compose.prod.yml run --rm buster generate

To preview your static website locally before pushing to GitHub Pages start the live service:

ghost-base $ docker-compose up live

and browse the website at http://localhost:80.

Development vs Production databases

As you can see in our docker-compose*.yml files we are using two data volumes, separating development and production databases. This allows you to make changes while testing the blog without affecting production data.

However, if you prefer, you can combine *dev and *prod services and data volumes into a single db service and data volume sharing the same data for development and production. Make sure you also adjust the database name in the config/*.env files.

License

This project is licensed under the MIT License.