Launch Friday Monks Using Ghost on a Ubuntu EC2 Instance

In this post we will look at launching a Ghost CMS instance on an AWS EC2 machine.

Install ghost⌗

# install ghost
sudo npm install ghost-cli@latest -g

Need a different user: calling it ibbur (Apparently a ghost name!). Ghost doesn’t install when the login name itself is ghost!!

sudo useradd -d /home/ibbur -m ibbur
sudo passwd ibbur
sudo adduser ibbur www-data
sudo adduser ibbur sudo

# change directory
cd ~/Dropbox/pandora/My-Projects/repos/

# create a directory for the ghost site
mkdir -p friday_monks

# change user
sudo su - ibbur

# note: change to the directory of installation

# set permissions for ibbur
sudo chown -R $USER:$USER friday_monks/

# change directory
cd friday_monks

# install ghost
ghost install --db sqlite3

Refer to Ghost CLI documentation for more information.

Troubleshooting⌗

Ghost installation runs into issues due my hyper weird already existing ubuntu username! Too lazy to change. Lets do a workaround now!

We basically will break down the setup stages and handle it manually as mentioned at Ghost-CLI commands: setup - Documentation

Reclaim Permissions! :-)⌗

# change back to ghost
whoami
cd ..

# change permissions back to ghost
sudo chown -R $USER:$USER friday_monks/

Setup NGINX⌗

ghost setup nginx

Done!


Setup SSL⌗

# Creates an SSL service for Ghost
ghost setup ssl

This ran into errors! :-(

I’ve done this before. This should work!

sudo certbot --authenticator standalone --installer nginx -d www.fridaymonks.com --pre-hook 'service nginx stop' --post-hook 'service nginx start'

This too ran into issues! But, the info here was more meaningful! I need to set the DNS Servers!

After settting up the DNS, the SSL setup worked flawlessly!

ghost setup ssl

Setup systemd⌗

ghost setup systemd

Re-setup ghost⌗

cd current

# reinstall node modules
npm i

Test ghost⌗

Environment="NODE_ENV=production"
ExecStart=/home/ghost/.nvm/versions/node/v12.19.0/bin/node /home/ghost/.nvm/versions/node/v12.19.0/bin/ghost run

Troubleshooting NGINX⌗

The ghost-cli config didn’t work smoothly for me. I had manually configure nginx, symlink the site and restart ghost!

Everything worked well thereafter!

Launch⌗

Upload a great theme and the site is live at Friday Monks!