Accessing Ghost over localhost fails because of https redirect

Developer help
1

Hello,

before publishing a Ghost site, I’m trying to work with Ghost over localhost, before allowing access to it over my reverse proxy. The problem I seem to be having is that Ghost keeps trying to redirect my browser’s localhost requests to https, which causes the connection to error out. How can I configure Ghost not to forward http requests to https? When the site is public, I will have my reverse proxy configured to do that anyway, and I really don’t see the benefit of https on localhost, especially since Ghost can’t even seem to complete the TLS handshake.

  • What’s your URL? This is the easiest way for others to help you
    Site not public yet
  • What version of Ghost are you using? If it’s not the latest, please update Ghost first before opening your topic
    6.24.0
  • How was Ghost installed and configured?
    Official Docker Compose
  • What Node version, database, OS & browser are you using?
    Same versions as included in the official compose file.
  • What errors or information do you see in the console?
ghost-1  | [2026-03-27 16:50:18] INFO "GET /" 301 5ms
ghost-1  | [2026-03-27 16:50:30] INFO "GET /" 301 2ms
  • What steps could someone else take to reproduce the issue you’re having?
  1. Install Ghost using the Docker Compose method.
  2. Configure .env and docker-compose.yml, but do not enable a reverse proxy.
  3. Try accessing Ghost over localhost.
  4. See TLS handshake errors - SSL_ERROR_RX_RECORD_TOO_LONG caused by Ghost attempting to redirect http://localhost:2368 to https://localhost:2368/.

Any help is greatly appreciated.

2

The solution ended up being changing:

url: https://${DOMAIN:?DOMAIN environment variable is required}

to

url: http://${DOMAIN:?DOMAIN environment variable is required}

in my compose file. And adding

DOMAIN=localhost:2368

to my .env,