Self hosting ghost blog on your home server

Ghost has one of most beautiful interface for both writing and reading post. The only downside that I found was that to leverage the full benefit I had to pay up. Of course Wordpress is an option to self host but only recently did I become aware that Ghost can be self hosted as well and has docker images that I could use.

In this post I will try my best to explaining how I got mine up and working

Prerequisites

I will assume that you have the following already set up

1. A linux server

2. Docker installed within it

3. Cloudflare tunnel or some way of exposing your service to the outside world

Let's start with the docker-compose.yaml

services:
  ghost:
    image: ghost:latest
    container_name: ghost-server
    environment:
      - url=https://blog.nikhildev.com
      - mail__transport=SMTP
      - mail__options__host=smtp.eu.mailgun.org
      - mail__options__port=587
      - mail__options__auth__user=<your_auth_user_email>
      - mail__options__auth__pass=<the_password_from_mailgun>
      - mail__from=blog@example.com #This probably will need verification
      - database__client=mysql
      - database__connection__host=db # Name of the service from below
      - database__connection__user=ghost
      - database__connection__password=ghost # You can choose a better password
      - database__connection__database=ghost
    volumes:
      - /docker_volumes/ghost/content:/var/lib/ghost/content # I prefer to map a different location for the safe keep of the data. The /docker_volumes is mirrored on zpool for redundancy
    restart: unless-stopped
    depends_on:
      - db
    ports:
      - "2368:2368"
  db:
    image: mysql:9
    container_name: ghost-db
    restart: always
    networks:
      - default
    volumes:
      - /docker_volumes/ghost/db/data:/var/lib/mysql
    environment:
      - MYSQL_DATABASE=ghost
      - MYSQL_USER=ghost
      - MYSQL_PASSWORD=ghost
      - MYSQL_ROOT_PASSWORD=ghost
      - MYSQL_ROOT_HOST=172.*.*.* ## Ensures the Docker network has access

In the above docker compose files we are defining two service. ghost-server is the main application and db is a mysql instance that it would be using.

Now, if you want the newsletter part of ghost be available to you, I would highly recommend signing up with something like Mailgun which has pretty generous free tier. Once you have signed up, use the generated credentials in ghost. Here is a great article on it https://brightthemes.com/blog/ghost-mailgun-config

I'm sticking to exposing the default port of the service as in my entire stack there are no conflicting ones.

The db service is vanilla mysql without any bells and whistles. The official guide suggests using mysql 8 but I've tried this with mysql 9 and it works just fine. We simply are setting the credentials before hand to be made accessible to the ghost instance. Even here I prefer to mount a redundant local directory just for safe keeps.

And that's it. Go ahead and run the container with docker compose up -d and run through the setup process. If you run into any issues, please leave a comment and I can probably try and help you out.