Deprecating Ghost-CLI (& other platform updates)

Developer help Self-hosting
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Hey folks :waving_hand:

Steve (@9larsons) and I make up the new Platform team at Ghost, formed to help address some of the issues around our developer tooling/release process (context). Over the past few months, we’ve been hard at work improving things and ironing out a specific roadmap, and we’re at the point where we’re ready to start sharing relevant pieces of that roadmap with the community :slightly_smiling_face:

Here’s a few initial updates you all should be aware of:

Deprecating Ghost-CLI with Ghost 7.0

After almost 10 years of development, we’ve made the decision to deprecate Ghost-CLI.

The Ghost 6.x release line will be the last major version of Ghost that is usable with Ghost-CLI.

Once Ghost 7.0 is released, the Ghost Docker Compose Setup will become the official way to self-host Ghost, and no further updates to Ghost-CLI will be made (other than urgent security fixes).

We know that there’s still work to be done on the Docker Compose setup before it can fully replace Ghost-CLI, and we’ll make sure all the current officially supported Ghost-CLI setups are also supported in the docker setup. That includes adding support for multi site setups (i.e. multiple Ghost instances on one server) as well as first-class support for local theme development (the use-case that ghost install local currently covers). Additionally, there will be a documented, supported migration path for current Ghost-CLI setups to migrate to the Docker Compose setup.

Our goal is to make the Docker Compose setup as easy to use as Ghost-CLI is currently. To that end - if you have a major Ghost-CLI use-case that the docker setup should support that aren’t listed above, please let us know!

Officially Maintaining the Ghost Docker Image (+ planning breaking changes with 7.0)

One of the issues raised in this post was that the Ghost team didn’t maintain the Ghost Docker image, despite it being the “official” Docker image :sweat_smile:. As of a couple months ago, that is no longer the case, and the official Docker image is now maintained by Ghost directly, meaning that security updates + fixes are now released alongside the standard Ghost publish. There is still a slight delay due to the Docker Official Images infrastructure, but we’ve been making things as quick/automatic as we can on our end.

As part of maintaining the official image, we’re planning on making a few structural breaking changes to the image as part of the Ghost 7.0 release, namely:

  • removing Ghost-CLI from the image (Ghost will be installed directly from source into the image)
  • moving the content volume from /var/lib/ghost/content to /home/ghost/content
  • changing the image to run as a specific ghost user instead of node (though the uid/gid will still be 1000:1000)

We’re going to publish a new variant of the 6.x Ghost Docker image soon with these breaking changes baked in, so that you can try them out + provide feedback prior to Ghost 7.0 being released.

Steve and I are going to be more active on the forum going forward, especially concerning self-hosting + platform-related issues, so feel free to provide any platform-related feedback :slightly_smiling_face:

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Thank you both for the work you’ve been doing on the “platform”. It’s been really great to see things move and for the help you’ve provided with PRs :raising_hands:

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Is there a rough timeline for 7.0? I don’t need a date, but are we looking at this fall / next summer / 2028 sometime?