docker-ghost
Docker golden image (gold/ghost) for Ghost.
Most interesting version tags
-
0.11 - latest of 0.11
-
0.11.12
-
0.11.8
-
0.11.7
Experimental branch
- alpine - not recomendet for production now.
Why yet another image for Ghost?
Ghost environments suggest that it's better to use production
The official container for Ghost is fine for running in development mode, but it has the wrong permissions for running in production.
Also backup script is backed in.
Switc from dev to production environment is easy. Beware in default config both modes operate on same database
/content/data/ghost.db
Quickstart
docker run --name some-ghost -p 8080:2368 -d gold/ghost
This will start Ghost in development mode and whire to the port 80 of the container.
Then, access it via http://localhost:8080 or http://host-ip:8080 in a browser.
Running in production
The official Ghost image places the blog content in /var/lib/ghost and exports it as a VOLUME.
This allows two main modes of operation:
Content on host filesystem
In this mode, the Ghost blog content lives on the filesystem of the host with the UID:GID of
1000:1000. If this is acceptable, create a directory somewhere, and use the -v Docker command
line option to mount it:
sudo mkdir -p /var/lib/ghost
sudo chown 1000:1000 /var/lib/ghost
docker run --name some-ghost --env-file /etc/default/ghost -p 80:2368 -v /var/lib/ghost:/var/lib/ghost -d gold/ghost npm start --production
This is very convinient, because you can tweak your configuration directly in host's /var/lib/ghost/confg.js.
Content in a data volume
This is the preferred mechanism to store the blog data. Please see the Docker documentation for backup, restore, and migration strategies.
docker create -v /var/lib/ghost --name some-ghost-content busybox
docker run --name some-ghost --env-file /etc/default/ghost -p 80:2368 --volumes-from some-ghost-content -d gold/ghost npm start --production
You should now be able to access this instance as http://www.example.com in a browser.
Configuration via environment variables
Epecially in case you run the content in a volume it's good to have a posibillity to injet some config form outide.
There are environment variables that can be used:
GHOST_URL: the URL of your blog (e.g.,http://www.example.com)MAIL_FROM: the email of the blog installation (e.g.,'"Webmaster" <[email protected]>')MAIL_HOST: which host to send email to (e.g.,mail.example.com)PROD_FORCE_ADMIN_SSL: Relevant for prodction mode only. Tel's Ghost to force use SSL for admin pages (default: true)MAIL_PORT: sets a port for secure mail connectionMAIL_SSL: set "true" or "false"MAIL_USERNAME: The username for the mail serverMAIL_PASSWORD: The password for the username above
These can either be set on the Docker command line directly, or stored in a file and passed on the Docker command line:
docker run --name some-ghost --env-file /etc/default/ghost -p 8080:2368 -d gold/ghost
Here an example of ENV variables file:
# Ghost environment example
# Place in /etc/default/ghost
GHOST_URL=http://www.example.com
MAIL_FROM='"Webmaster" <[email protected]>'
MAIL_HOST=mail.example.com
PROD_FORCE_ADMIN_SSL=true
MAIL_SSL=true
MAIL_PORT=465
[email protected]
MAIL_PASSWORD=hopefullyasecurepassword
Behind a reverse proxy
Of course, you should really be running Ghost behind a reverse proxy, and set things up to auto restart. For that, a reasonable container would be:
docker create --name some-ghost -h ghost.example.com --env-file /etc/default/ghost -p 127.0.0.1:2368:2368 --volumes-from some-ghost-content --restart=on-failure:10 gold/ghost npm start --production
docker run some-ghost
Backup
Backup is working for host based or volume based data (see below)
docker run --rm --volumes-from some-ghost -v $(pwd)/backups:/backups gold/ghost /backup.sh
Backups ghost to current directory.
Restoring Backup
Attention: Restore script for volume based data keeping is not provied yet. Make sure you know what to do.
For the host based solution just extract backup file content to volume location on host. Please contact me if you have good ideas how to improve things here.
Example docker-comose.yaml
ghost:
image: gold/ghost:0.7.9
command: npm start --production
restart: always
ports:
- "2368:2368"
volumes:
- /var/containerdata/ghost/blog/:/var/lib/ghost
environment:
- GHOST_URL=http://example.com
- PROD_FORCE_ADMIN_SSL=true
- MAIL_FROM='"Webmaster" <[email protected]>'
- MAIL_HOST=mail.example.com
- MAIL_SSL=true
- MAIL_PORT=465
- [email protected]
- MAIL_PASSWORD=hopefullyasecurepassword
Even if env varibales are provided, config.js can b still found and tweaked in /var/containerdata/ghost/blog/ on the host.