NickPersico.com Blog

My personal blog, run on DigitalOcean and powered by Ghost.

Updating DigitalOcean with the latest code

It's hacky, but it seems to be the easiest way to run ghost locally and maintain the integrity of DigitalOcean's one-click Ghost droplet.

Once you've made changes to the huckleberry theme and pushed the changes to Github, you need to copy the changed theme files to the live Ghost directory:

1. SSH into the DigitalOcean droplet: ssh root@DROPLET_IP_ADDRESS
2. cd ..
3. cd nickpersico-blog to go into the Git repository for the blog.
4. Pull down the latest code you just committed.
5. Go back a directory (cd ..)
6. Sync the new theme file changes in the repository with the active Ghost directory: rsync -r nickpersico-blog/content/themes/huckleberry/* var/www/ghost/content/themes/huckleberry/

After reloading the blog, you should see the updated changes live in production.

Restarting Ghost on DigitalOcean

1. SSH into the DigitalOcean droplet: ssh root@DROPLET_IP_ADDRESS
2. cd ..
3. cd var/www/ghost
4. service ghost restart

Renewal cronjob syntax

The DigitalOcean droplet is running a cronjob every 30 days at 1:05AM to renew the certificate. --force-renew ignores the renewal date and forces the renewal to happen.

# Renew  SSL certificate via letsencrypt every 30 days at 1:05AM
5 1 30 * * sudo ~/.local/share/letsencrypt/bin/letsencrypt renew --force-renew --pre-hook "service nginx stop" --post-hook "service nginx start"