How-To: Setup a Blog Easy-Mode

A little learning is a dangerous thing

Update

Clearly I am not running a ghost blog anymore. I’ve switched over to GitHub pages for the simpler setup/management and lower costs. I’ll keep this post around for others interested in Ghost or just in case I go back and need to set it up again.

Once I decided to consolidate my learning into a blog format, I needed a platform.  I briefly considered one of the one-stop-shop solutions (i.e. wordpress.com), but being the nerd that I am, I wanted more control.  I settled with a Digital Ocean Droplet, Docker, and Ghost.  Below, I detail the setup that I used to get up and running (I’ve also included some of the other solutions that I considered).

One-Stop-Shops

Up and Running Easy-Peasy

Technologies Used

Summarized Setup
To start with, I created an account on digital ocean and setup a docker droplet. Prices vary, but I would stick with one of the cheaper options since you don’t need a lot of horsepower for a new blog. Once the droplet finishes setup, I created a few things (we’ll go over them in detail later on). Lastly, I used docker-compose to setup my infrastructure and then lets-encrypt tools for digital signatures.

Created Files

  • Slightly Customized DockerFile for nginx
  • Docker-Compose.yml
  • Default.conf file for nginx settings

Digital Ocean and Droplet Setup

  1. Register an account at https://www.digitalocean.com/
  2. Create a new project and name it something related to your blog
  3. Create a new droplet by clicking the “Create” button and selecting “Droplets”
  4. Select “Docker 18.09” (Versioning will be different depending on the latest version)
  5. Scroll down and select your plan. (Click “Show all plans” to view the cheap options)
  6. Scroll down and choose a hostname
  7. Click Create

At this point your droplet will spin up. You will get an email once it completes, but in my experience it took less than 2 minutes.

Check your email and make note of the temporary root password

Once the droplet is up and running you should see it listed in your project. Console in by clicking on the droplet and clicking “Console” on the right side of the screen.

The console will pop up and you can log in as root with the root password that you noted above.

Initial Setup
At this point docker should already be installed, so all we need to do is prepare our files. For this setup, we will be using docker-compose to stand up a ghost container and an nginx container. For more information on docker, containers, and docker-compose visit the docker website. To learn how to do all of this, I utilized two blogs

docker-compose.yml
Let’s start with the docker-compose file. Open your favorite text editor and copy the lines below and save it as docker-compose.yml in your root directory.

version: '2'
services:

  blog:
    image: ghost:latest
    container_name: blog
    restart: always
    environment:
      url: https://example.com
    volumes:
      - /opt/ghost_content:/var/lib/ghost/content
  nginx:
    build:
      context: ./nginx
      dockerfile: Dockerfile
    restart: always
    depends_on:
      - blog
    ports:
      - "80:80"
      - "443:443"
    volumes:
       - /etc/letsencrypt/:/etc/letsencrypt/
       - /usr/share/nginx/html:/usr/share/nginx/html

Directory Setup
Now we need to create some directories.

mkdir -p ghost/content
mkdir nginx

nginx Setup
Jump into your nginx folder cd nginx and create a file called Dockerfile and place the following inside

FROM nginx:latest

COPY default.conf /etc/nginx/conf.d

This creates a slightly modified nginx image by copying a custom configuration file into it (See below). Close your Dockerfile and lets move on.

default.conf
Create a new file called default.conf in your current directory (nginx/). Copy the contents below into default.conf

server {
  listen 80;
  listen [::]:80;
  server_name example.com;
  location /.well-known/acme-challenge/ { root /usr/share/nginx/html; allow all; }
  location / { return 301 https://$host$request_uri; }
}

server {
  listen 443 ssl http2;
  listen [::]:443 ssl http2;
  server_name example.com;

  ssl_protocols TLSv1.2;
  ssl_ciphers HIGH:!MEDIUM:!LOW:!aNULL:!NULL:!SHA;
  ssl_prefer_server_ciphers on;
  ssl_session_cache shared:SSL:10m;

  ssl_certificate /etc/letsencrypt/live/example.com/fullchain.pem;
  ssl_certificate_key /etc/letsencrypt/live/example.com/privkey.pem;

  location / {
    proxy_set_header Host $host;
    proxy_set_header X-Real-IP $remote_addr;
    proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-Proto https;
    proxy_pass http://ghost:2368;
  }
}

This configuration sets nginx up as a proxy which will handle SSL for us. Save the file and continue on.

Bring Up The Infrastructure
Go back to the dir with your docker-compose.yml cd ..
We’ll run docker-compose with the -d switch to detach and let it run in the background

docker-compose up -d

–Note: If you need to make changes and re-run this then you will need to add the –build switch to rebuild the custom nginx image

docker-compose up -d --build

Setup Lets Encrypt
We’ll be using Let’s Encrypt as our Certificate Authority. To do that, we’ll make use of a few tools to simplify the process. I used Digital Ocean’s guide to help for this part.

First, install some dependencies.

add-apt-repository ppa:certbot/certbot
apt update
install python-certbot-nginx

Next, make sure that the firewall will allow our nginx container to talk to the internet.
Check

ufw status
ufw allow 80
ufw allow 443

Now its time to setup our certs

certbot --nginx -d example.com -d www.example.com

When presented with the option, select 1: No Redirect..

Clean-Up
Restart the infrastructure.

docker-compose down
docker-compose up -d

Check the nginx logs to make certain that there aren’t any errors

docker logs proxy

Remember from above that we named our nginx container proxy

Visit your site and check for Ghost!

To complete the setup visit the admin portal by appending /admin to your url.