In this tutorial, we are going to talk about the requirements to build a Ghost website and the infrastructures you can choose to suit your own needs.

For illustration purpose, we will install a Ghost website locally, and in later tutorials we will deploy Ghost on server or third party provider.

Check Ghost official documentation to following the latest version's requirements.

Declaration

  • The commands in code blocks need to be executed in the terminal prompt of your device.
  • In order to separate local and remote (server) environment, I use $ to indicate the remote environment commands.
  • The lines start with # indicate comment which I use for explanation, anything after it won't be executed.

Setup Node.js & npm

Since Ghost is a Node.js application and can be managed through npm (node package manager), we need to install node.js in our computer first. Specifically, Ghost requires a certain version of Node.js to install. Up to this tutorial, Ghost can be installed with Node 10.x version, check the documentation for latest supported node version for Ghost.

Install Homebrew

If you are using MacOS, you can install Node v10 and npm by Homebrew (MacOS package manager), this will automatically install npm for you too:

# install Homebrew
/usr/bin/ruby -e "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/master/install)"

# upgrade homebrew
brew upgrade

Install Nodejs and npm

# use Homebrew to install node v10
brew install node@10

You can also use the following Homebrew command to manage with the node version:

brew search node # search for available node versions
brew unlink node@11 # unlink the node with v11
brew link node@10 # re-link node with v10
brew uninstall node@11 # uninstall node v11

After installation, you need to add node to your PATH (as the installation guide warned), so node@10 is installed globally as default at your computer:

echo 'export PATH="/usr/local/opt/node@10/bin:$PATH"' >> ~/.bash_profile
source ~/.bash_profile

After installed, you can use the following command to check if correct version is installed:

node -v
v10.15.2 # returned version number
npm -v
6.4.1 # returned version number

You can also use yarn to manage packages, but for simplicity, we will use npm to manage packages in this tutorial.

Install Ghost-CLI

Ghost provides a CLI (Command Line Interface) tool for us to easily install and manage with Ghost websites.

# use npm to install package called ghost-cli
# at the latest version globally
npm install ghost-cli@latest -g

If missing permission error occurs:

Missing write access to /usr/local/lib/node_modules

You may need to install this with sudo (lock-screen password required, won't be shown on screen, hit enter after you done):

sudo npm install ghost-cli@latest -g

After installing this Ghost-CLI, you can use ghost <command> to execute ghost commands to manage ghost related tasks. For example, you can always use ghost help for command help.

Update Ghost-CLI

If the terminal gives you a notification about you are using an outdated Ghost-cli, you can use the install command provided above to upgrade it.

Now we have everything we need to install a Ghost website, in the next tutorial we will use the Ghost-CLI to install our first Ghost website.