Deploying Ghost CMS

Ghost is an open-source publishing platform built with Node.js designed to make blogging simple. Ghost also provides a flexible frontend ready to use for your blog.

In this guide, you will learn how to deploy Ghost using the official Docker image and MySQL on Northflank.

1. Create a new MySQL database in a new project on Northflank. For increased security, we recommend keeping SSL enabled and External Access disabled. You can start with the smallest compute plan with 4 GB of storage and one replica.

2. Create a new deployment service deploying from an external image. Set the image path to ghost:latest. Port 2368 will be automatically detected and exposed. Once created, copy the service URL or optionally link a custom domain.

3. Create a new secret group which will store the environment variables. We will manually add key value secrets and link the MySQL database we created earlier.

   1. Manual Secrets

      Key	Value
      url	The unique service code.run deployment URL or a linked custom domain (prefixed with https://)
      database__client	mysql
      database__connection__ssl	{}

      

   2. Inherited connection details from the database

      Variable name	Alias
      host	database__connection__host
      username	database__connection__user
      password	database__connection__password
      database	database__connection__database

      

      • Inheriting environment variables ensures that the database connection details are automatically injected in the environment, avoiding the need to manually copy and paste them.

4. Go back to your service and rollout a restart. A new container will initiate the database and set everything up. Once finished, you can open the service URL followed by /ghost to create your first administrator.

5. Optionally, navigate to Volumes and add new volume to persist your media uploads across container restarts. Choose the name, storage and set container mount path to /var/lib/ghost/content. Saving the volume will rollout a restart and your Ghost deployment will be ready when the container boots up.

   • Volume storage cannot be scaled down once created. Start with the lowest one you need for your media uploads.