# Deprecating Ghost-CLI (& other platform updates) **URL:** \ **Category:** Self-hosting\ **Tags:** ghost-cli\ **Created:** [August 18, 2026, 9:30pm UTC](https://forum.ghost.org/t/deprecating-ghost-cli-other-platform-updates/63595 "2026-08-18T21:30:17Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 13\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![acburdine](https://sea1.discourse-cdn.com/flex015/user_avatar/forum.ghost.org/acburdine/32/4825_2.png) [@acburdine](https://forum.ghost.org/u/acburdine)\ **Post date:** [August 18, 2026, 9:30pm UTC](https://forum.ghost.org/t/deprecating-ghost-cli-other-platform-updates/63595/1 "2026-08-18T21:30:17Z")
Hey folks 👋 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](https://forum.ghost.org/t/self-hosters-left-vulnerable-to-xss-vuln-due-to-second-class-docker-support/61674/38)). 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 🙂 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](https://github.com/TryGhost/Ghost-CLI/releases/tag/1.0.0-alpha.1), 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](https://github.com/TryGhost/ghost-docker) 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](https://forum.ghost.org/t/hosting-several-sites-on-same-server-using-docker/61041/2) (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](https://forum.ghost.org/t/self-hosters-left-vulnerable-to-xss-vuln-due-to-second-class-docker-support/61674/38) was that the Ghost team didn’t maintain the Ghost Docker image, despite it being the “official” Docker image 😅. 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 🙂 ---
**Author:** ![jannis](https://sea1.discourse-cdn.com/flex015/user_avatar/forum.ghost.org/jannis/32/39718_2.png) [@jannis](https://forum.ghost.org/u/jannis)\ **Post date:** [August 19, 2026, 5:23am UTC](https://forum.ghost.org/t/deprecating-ghost-cli-other-platform-updates/63595/2 "2026-08-19T05:23:53Z")
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 🙌 ---
**Author:** ![Cathy\_Sarisky](https://sea1.discourse-cdn.com/flex015/user_avatar/forum.ghost.org/cathy_sarisky/32/25750_2.png) [@Cathy\_Sarisky](https://forum.ghost.org/u/Cathy_Sarisky)\ **Post date:** [August 19, 2026, 11:26am UTC](https://forum.ghost.org/t/deprecating-ghost-cli-other-platform-updates/63595/3 "2026-08-19T11:26:19Z")
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? ---
**Author:** ![acburdine](https://sea1.discourse-cdn.com/flex015/user_avatar/forum.ghost.org/acburdine/32/4825_2.png) [@acburdine](https://forum.ghost.org/u/acburdine)\ **Post date:** [August 19, 2026, 3:33pm UTC](https://forum.ghost.org/t/deprecating-ghost-cli-other-platform-updates/63595/4 "2026-08-19T15:33:41Z")
Still a ways out - not until 2027 at least. ---
**Author:** ![MPAQ](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/ba8739/32.png) [@MPAQ](https://forum.ghost.org/u/MPAQ)\ **Post date:** [October 7, 2026, 5:15pm UTC](https://forum.ghost.org/t/deprecating-ghost-cli-other-platform-updates/63595/5 "2026-10-07T17:15:18Z")
I’ve managed to **NOT** docker in all my systems. Now, you’ve made it mandatory??? Another program to make it run slower, DAMN IT. ---
**Author:** ![jannis](https://sea1.discourse-cdn.com/flex015/user_avatar/forum.ghost.org/jannis/32/39718_2.png) [@jannis](https://forum.ghost.org/u/jannis)\ **Post date:** [October 7, 2026, 6:45pm UTC](https://forum.ghost.org/t/deprecating-ghost-cli-other-platform-updates/63595/6 "2026-10-07T18:45:39Z")
I am pretty sure you’ll still be able to start the Node.js app without Docker, if you _really_ wanted to. Though…I have not heard of any relevant performance impact of Docker in a production system in a while. On Linux, a container is just a regular process with some kernel isolation around it. Ghost’s code essentially runs natively, with no VM in between. ---
**Author:** ![acburdine](https://sea1.discourse-cdn.com/flex015/user_avatar/forum.ghost.org/acburdine/32/4825_2.png) [@acburdine](https://forum.ghost.org/u/acburdine)\ **Post date:** [October 7, 2026, 6:56pm UTC](https://forum.ghost.org/t/deprecating-ghost-cli-other-platform-updates/63595/7 "2026-10-07T18:56:38Z")
@jannis is correct here - the overhead of Docker is fairly minimal. The only realistic overhead is that of the Docker daemon itself (50-100mb, which isn’t _nothing_, but in general it shouldn’t make Ghost itself slower) The biggest win for Docker is being able to more quickly and safely perform version updates (including, hopefully, from within Ghost’s Admin panel itself, akin to Wordpress-style one-click updates). That was previously not feasible with Ghost-CLI installs because of the permissions/process management complexity. Also, the fact that Ghost-CLI has to install all of Ghost’s dependencies for every new version meant that it would regularly exceed available RAM on smaller VPSs. Ghost’s Docker image ships with dependencies pre-installed so there’s much less that an individual version update has to do. And - we can do install optimizations in the Docker image that are more difficult to do with Ghost-CLI. I’ll admit that Docker on non-linux OSes does add _some_ overhead, though it’s significantly less these days than it used to be. That said, if you do find performance regressions in the Ghost Docker setup (that don’t exist in the CLI setup), I’m definitely interesting in hearing about it - we definitely want to make the Ghost setup as efficient as possible 😃 ---
**Author:** ![officialrajdeepsingh](https://sea1.discourse-cdn.com/flex015/user_avatar/forum.ghost.org/officialrajdeepsingh/32/39608_2.png) [@officialrajdeepsingh](https://forum.ghost.org/u/officialrajdeepsingh)\ **Post date:** [October 10, 2026, 11:57am UTC](https://forum.ghost.org/t/deprecating-ghost-cli-other-platform-updates/63595/8 "2026-10-10T11:57:17Z")
@acburdine For local development, such as theme building in Ghost CMS, we also need to use Docker. ---
**Author:** ![acburdine](https://sea1.discourse-cdn.com/flex015/user_avatar/forum.ghost.org/acburdine/32/4825_2.png) [@acburdine](https://forum.ghost.org/u/acburdine)\ **Post date:** [October 10, 2026, 12:24pm UTC](https://forum.ghost.org/t/deprecating-ghost-cli-other-platform-updates/63595/9 "2026-10-10T12:24:09Z")
Yup, that setup is being worked on as well. We’ll have a beta version of the ghost-docker setup for local use here in the next week or two 🙂 (including a migration path from ghost-cli local to docker) ---
**Author:** ![EchonCique](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/c4cdca/32.png) [@EchonCique](https://forum.ghost.org/u/EchonCique)\ **Post date:** [October 10, 2026, 7:27pm UTC](https://forum.ghost.org/t/deprecating-ghost-cli-other-platform-updates/63595/10 "2026-10-10T19:27:33Z")
I do understand the ambition to make a better and more robust solution that does not include hundreds of NPM packages. However, Docker is not something I would call ”better” when it comes to running Ghost natively on macOS. Docker requires a dedicated virtual environment that consumes CPU, MEM and DISK of the underlying OS. All of a sudden a few Ghost sites consumes 10-20% of the total resources available instead of tiny blips in terms of CPU and MEM cycles. Once the CLI is deprecated, will there be any other supported methods of running Ghost on macOS? And a control question, will the images be fully viable in alternatives to Docker of which there are plenty? Oh and a third one … will there be AMD64 and ARM64 builds or only AMD64? ---
**Author:** ![acburdine](https://sea1.discourse-cdn.com/flex015/user_avatar/forum.ghost.org/acburdine/32/4825_2.png) [@acburdine](https://forum.ghost.org/u/acburdine)\ **Post date:** [October 10, 2026, 8:02pm UTC](https://forum.ghost.org/t/deprecating-ghost-cli-other-platform-updates/63595/11 "2026-10-10T20:02:27Z")
> Once the CLI is deprecated, will there be any other supported methods of running Ghost on macOS? It will still be possible to build and run Ghost from the source GitHub repo, but it’s also worth mentioning that support for SQLite is being dropped in Ghost 7.0, so you will also need MySQL setup locally, either via Homebrew or via a MySQL container. > And a control question, will the images be fully viable in alternatives to Docker of which there are plenty? Not sure exactly what you mean 😅. If you’re referring to being able to use Ghost’s docker images with non-docker runtimes (i.e. podman or [Apple Container](https://github.com/apple/container)), then I _believe_ it’s possible as long as whatever runtime you’re using supports the OCI specification. The only thing that may not work out of the box with non-Docker runtimes is Ghost’s [docker-compose setup](https://github.com/TryGhost/ghost-docker). > Oh and a third one … will there be AMD64 and ARM64 builds or only AMD64? Ghost’s “official image” on DockerHub has always had amd64/arm64 builds on both Alpine and Debian. We just started publishing [nightly builds](https://hub.docker.com/r/ghost/nightly) as well on Debian that are arm64/amd64. ---
**Author:** ![EchonCique](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/c4cdca/32.png) [@EchonCique](https://forum.ghost.org/u/EchonCique)\ **Post date:** [October 10, 2026, 8:12pm UTC](https://forum.ghost.org/t/deprecating-ghost-cli-other-platform-updates/63595/12 "2026-10-10T20:12:26Z")
Spot on. Cheers! That would make life easier for me using macOS indeed. ---
**Author:** ![acburdine](https://sea1.discourse-cdn.com/flex015/user_avatar/forum.ghost.org/acburdine/32/4825_2.png) [@acburdine](https://forum.ghost.org/u/acburdine)\ **Post date:** [October 21, 2026, 1:07pm UTC](https://forum.ghost.org/t/deprecating-ghost-cli-other-platform-updates/63595/13 "2026-10-21T13:07:29Z")
As a follow-up to this, the new Docker setup + Ghost-CLI migration paths is ready for beta testing: [The new Docker setup is ready for (beta) testing!](https://forum.ghost.org/t/the-new-docker-setup-is-ready-for-beta-testing/64039) 😃