Installing the Ghost CMS with Infomaniak

WordPress drives almost 30% of the Web and is the most commonly used CMS in the world for creating websites with Joomla and Drupal (1). Free, user-friendly, easy to install and extremely flexible, WordPress has a lot going for it. However, it must be said that over time, WordPress has got bogged down and more and more people are looking for credible free and independent alternatives to WordPress.

Ghost, an interesting alternative to WordPress for creating a minimalist blog

If you want to go back to a simple, streamlined, reactive CMS which is dedicated to the content of your blog, then you are clearly among Ghost’s target market.

Launched in 2013, Ghost is an Open Source CMS designed for creating streamlined blogs. Its minimalist admin interface is user-friendly, and its articles are written in Markdown, a text formatting language which is easy to learn and can save a lot of time once it has been adopted.

Compared to WordPress, Ghost is faster, more user-friendly, and allows you to focus your visitors’ attention on your content. However, Ghost is less flexible and complete than WordPress, and it requires a certain level of technical expertise to install as well as a web hosting which is compatible with the software platform Node.js in order to function.

This s what the Ghost admin interface looks like

As we announced in our roadmap, the software platform Node.js will soon be available on all our web hostings, and it is already possible to install Node.js applications with a managed Cloud Server.

Installing Ghost on a managed Cloud Server

Create a hosting and an FTP/SSH account on your Cloud Server
Contact our support team to enable Node.js (give us the hosting name and the FTP/SSH account name)
Log into SSH in your hosting
Recover the latest version of Ghost using the command
curl -L https://ghost.org/zip/ghost-latest.zip -o ghost.zip
Unzip the Ghost file in your site’s target directory using the command
unzip -uo ghost.zip -d website-folder
Go to the Ghost folder and launch the Ghost installation with the command
cd website-folder && npm install --production
Ghost working on port 2368, traffic needs to be redirected using the site’s .htaccess file. At the root of the site, open or create the .htaccess file with the command
nano .htaccess
Insert the following instructions in the .htaccess file:
RewriteEngine On RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://localhost:2368/$1 [L,P]
Start Ghost with the command
npm start --production
Test that your site is working
Follow this guide to ensure that Ghost is permanently working