How to Manually install Ghost and Node.js

Update your OS

First, make sure that you have your OS updated and all required packages are installed. You can perform this following the instructions below depending on your server operation system.

Instructions for CentOS using yum:

yum -y update
yum -y groupinstall "Development Tools"

Instructions for Ubuntu using apt-get:

apt-get -y update
aptitude -y install build-essential zip

Install Node.js

When your OS is updated, please process with the Node.js installation:

cd /root/
wget http://nodejs.org/dist/node-latest.tar.gz
tar -xzf node-latest.tar.gz

Enter the node folder which you have just extracted from the archive and execute:

./configure
make -s
make install

When the installation is completed you should be able to see node on your server by executing:

[root@ghost ~]# whereis node
node: /usr/local/bin/node

Install Ghost

Now we can proceed with the Ghost installation. For this tutorial we will use /var/www directory but you can install Ghost in any folder suitable for your needs. Please execute the following commands:

mkdir -p /var/www
cd /var/www
curl -L -O https://ghost.org/zip/ghost-latest.zip
unzip -d ghost ghost-latest.zip
rm ghost.zip
cd ghost/
/usr/local/bin/npm install --production

Configure the Domain and Port

Now that we have Ghost downloaded and installed, we need to apply some final tweaks to configure our Ghost blog with the correct port and domain. There are two important settings to configure -- the IP address for which the Ghost process will listen for new connections and the port on which it will be accessible. As the standard HTTP port is 80 we will reconfigure the config.js to work for any IP on the server on port 80. This can be done using the following command:

sed -e 's/127.0.0.1/0.0.0.0/' -e 's/2368/80/' <config.example.js >config.js

The next step is to configure the domain name of your Ghost blog. This can be done using:

replace my-ghost-blog.com example.com -- config.js

Please make sure to change 'example.com' to your actual domain name.

Now you are ready to start your Ghost blog. This can be done by simply executing:

node index.js
Ghost is running in development...
Listening on 0.0.0.0:80
Url configured as: http://my-ghost-blog.com