Hosting your own blog with ghost, Ubuntu & nginx

Configuring your Ubuntu Server

You will need SSH and root access.

You will need to know the public IP address of your Ubuntu server. You can check this in the following ways.

See: https://www.makeuseof.com/get-public-ip-address-in-linux/

Setting up Ghost

NodeJS can be installed by searching for nodesource GitHub.

Then you will need to install the Ghost CLI.

sudo npm install --location=global ghost-cli@latest

Now create a folder and install the ghost blog there.

sudo mkdir -p /var/www/blog
sudo chown $LOGNAME:$LOGNAME /var/www/blog
chmod 775 /var/www/blog

cd /var/www/blog
ghost install --db=sqlite3
ghost setup

Set the URL to the full URL for that server, e.g. https://example.com/blog

Choose to start ghost. Then verify it is running with these commands.

ghost ls
curl localhost:2368  # May not return a 200, but should return something

Domain registration & DNS records

Register a domain and point its "A" records to your Ubuntu server's IP.

1. Register for an account
2. Go to Services > Register a New Domain, and complete the steps.
3. Go to Services > My Domains, and click "Manage" for your domain
4. Click the last tab, "Manage Freenom DNS"

Now using the IP address of your Ubuntu server as the Target, add two A records. One with a blank Name, and one with WWW. The Target for both should be your Ubuntu server's IP.

Click save changes and start the next steps. It will take 10 - 15 minutes for the DNS server to fully refresh its cache.

Basic routing in nginx

We'll be working on the VPS again for this step. You'll want to install the nginx Debian package, as well as the CertBot snap.

sudo apt install nginx
sudo snap install certbot --classic

Enable ufw and make firewall exceptions.

sudo ufw enable
sudo ufw allow "Nginx Full"
sudo ufw allow OpenSSH

Now you can enable your site availability in the nginx config.

sudo vim /etc/nginx/sites-available/default

And update it as follows. You will need to replace nutra.tk with your domain name. Since we are already running ghost on our VPS at port 2368, our configuration will look like this.

server {
  server_name nutra.tk;
  listen [::]:443 ssl ipv6only=on;
  listen 443 ssl;

  # Ghost
  client_max_body_size 50m;
  root /var/www/blog/system/nginx-root; # Used for acme.sh SSL verification (https://acme.sh)

  location ^~ /blog/ {
    proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
    proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-Proto $scheme;
    proxy_set_header X-Real-IP $remote_addr;
    proxy_set_header Host $http_host;
    proxy_pass http://127.0.0.1:2368;
    proxy_redirect off;
  }

  location ~ /.well-known {
    allow all;
  }

  # default favicon
  location = /favicon.ico {
    alias /var/www/favicon.gif;
  }
}


# Redirect all HTTP to HTTPS with no-WWW
server {
  listen 80 default_server;
  listen [::]:80 default_server;
  server_name ~^(?:www\.)?(.*)$;
  return 301 https://$1$request_uri;
}


# Redirect WWW to no-WWW
server {
  listen 443 ssl http2;
  listen [::]:443 ssl http2;
  server_name ~^www\.(.*)$;
  return 301 $scheme://$1$request_uri;
}

If you don't want to have the /blog on the end of your URL, you can use your homepage as the blog. Simply replace ^~ /blog/ with /.

To test your changes and reload nginx, run this.

sudo nginx -t
sudo nginx -s reload

Now your blog should be public at your domain URL.

NOTE: You may wish to copy a (small 32x32) GIF display icon into the location /var/www/favicon.gif

NOTE: Bonus points if you manage to install git, and initialize a repo at the root /.git, keeping track of any changes in the nginx default file and related configs.

sudo certbot \
    --nginx \
    --key-type ecdsa \
    --preferred-chain "ISRG Root X1" \
    -d example.com

Backups (and other words of caution)

Self-hosting can be tough. You need to back up regularly, and any writing, any comments or media uploaded in between is precarious. If anything happens to your VPS, you may be only able to restore as recently as your last backup point.

One option is to register a cronjob (on your personal machine), which performs a secure copy command twice a day. You can then perform weekly compressions and store to Google drive or run rsync on a large hard disk of your own. Ghost CLI supports a backup command, and an export feature from the admin labs in the UI.

My blog does not run on NodeJS or ghost, because it is using tools like python, sphinx, ablog, and pelican to generate static HTML and efficiently serve that up through nginx.

An application like this also won't scale to millions of views per day without heavily tweaking, adding, and improving things.

But it is a solid starting point, and can handle more requests than most websites will see.