Creating a development version of a production site

Developer help
1

I recently created a ghost install on a Linode server I control. I basically just followed the instructions here How to install & setup Ghost on Ubuntu 16.04, 18.04, 20.04 or 22.04. My server is running Ubuntu 22.04.1. I accepted the defaults for most everything. What I ended up with was apparently just a production site. There is a config.production.json file but none for development. Basically, I just want to create a dev version of the stuff in production and then set up a workflow so that I can preview changes in dev and then migrate them to prod.

Some other concerns are that I answered yes to “create an SSL site” but I’m not actually sure how to get the site to use SSL. I believe I tried just changing the http to https in the “url” field of the config file and restarting but that didn’t work. Ideally, I’d like the site itself to be running without SSL and the admin parts to use SSL.

2

What type of development are you doing?

If you’re doing theme development, I like to create a local install and then use our theme deploy GitHub Action to update the theme on production.

For converting your site to SSL (which should be the whole site), you’ll need to update the config: Ghost-CLI - A fully loaded tool for installation and configuration