spooky

spooky is a hauntingly convoluted way to:

• host a Ghost blog in a Docker container;
• run its database using MySQL compatible MariaDB in another container;
• and serve it on a reverse proxy using Traefik with free HTTPS provided by Let's Encrypt.

This is going to host my personal portfolio site, lmcly.fyi.

I put this together in a few hours on a bank holiday weekend by judiciously borrowing from other people's tutorials or blog posts.

I can't offer support, because I'm just a journalist that knows how to google search error messages, but I'll help where I can.

I'm still working on this and it's at an early stage so please USE AT YOUR OWN RISK.

Configuration

spooky is mostly configured with .env files. These live in the ghost and traefik folders. You only really need to change MYSQL_ROOT_PASSWORD, MYSQL_PASSWORD, GHOST_DOMAIN. Even, TRAEFIK_MONITOR_DOMAIN is optional, but nice to have.

These are all written as key-value pairs: GHOST_DOMAIN=example.com

Here's what you need to know:

ghost/.env

env	defaults	notes
MYSQL_ROOT_PASSWORD	changeme
MYSQL_DATABASE	db
MYSQL_USER	spooky_user
MYSQL_PASSWORD	changeme
GHOST_DOMAIN	example.com

traefik/.env

env	defaults	notes
TRAEFIK_MONITOR_DOMAIN	monitor.example.com	optional

Setup

Before you start, you'll need:

• An Ubuntu 16.04 server with Docker and Docker Compose.
  • I recommend firing up a DigitalOcean Docker Droplet. $5 a month will get you 1GB memory, 25 GB storage and 1 TB transfer bandwidth.
  • If you decide to go with DigitalOcean, you can amend and paste cloud-config.yaml by ticking the box [ ] User Data when setting up the droplet.
  • I've also got a referral link that gets you $10 in credit (Full transparency: I get $25 credit once someone who uses the link spends $25)
• A domain (example.com) and subdomain (monitor.example.com) pointing towards this server. I use Cloudflare for DNS.

---

1. Copy or git clone this repo to /opt or your home folders. If you choose /opt remember to prefix commands with sudo where needed.
2. In traefik/traefik.toml:

• Add your email address in the [acme] section
• In [entryPoints.webentry.auth.basic], replace users = ["user:password"] with a username and password you've generated using htpasswd.
  • The command to use is htpasswd -nbm username password

3. touch traefik/acme.json and fix its permissions by running chmod 0600 traefik/acme.json.
4. Enter your own MYSQL_ROOT_PASSWORD, MYSQL_PASSWORD and GHOST_DOMAIN in ghost/.env.
5. Enter your own TRAEFIK_MONITOR_DOMAIN in traefik/.env.
6. cd ../traefik and run docker-compose up -d
7. cd ../ghost and run docker-compose up -d
8. Head to your domain to set up your new blog - example.com/ghost

Upgrading

Want to upgrade to the latest and greatest Ghost?

In ghost/build/Dockerfile, edit the first line to FROM ghost:X.X using the version number you need from the official Docker Hub page for ghost

Thanks & acknowledgements

A lot of the initial work for this is based on a tutorial post written by Lorenz Vanthillo on Medium. That includes the idea to build the ghost container separately and add a wait-for-it script to wait for the MariaDB container to be ready.