Failing to install ghost for months. How do you install it?!

Here’s some back story:

I build a website for my place of work; just a simple about page, events page, and a food menu. I went through AWS (Route 53 for domain services, LightSail for hosting), and while it took me some days to figure it all out, I got it to run, and it’s been going for a little over a year now. I’ve really been enjoying the Handlebars language, and simplicity of backend GUI. I wanted to make a personal blog using the same setup.

AWS installs (outside of just base OS instances) are all set up with Bitnami, which mostly uses control scripts and tucks the ghost install structure in hard to find places. Bitnami’s setup files and guides leave the end user with a lot of additional work. Items like manually configuring SSL certs, editing config json’s because the setup failed to do so, not updating http entries to https after you’ve included SSL certs (which usually breaks image hosting), and make it overall hard to use (one ‘fix’ usually leads to a another problem.

Now I’ve also tried manual ghost installs (using ghost.org’s guides) on top of Ubuntu 18.04 and 20.02, premade NGINX, and LAMP stacks. I end up with gateway errors, NGINX magically breaking, seemingly unresolvable permission errors, or issues where ghost won’t start/restart, and the whole instance has to be reinstalled (after following guides).

Between all the errors and call for help I’ve seen on this forum, stackexchange, ubuntu forums, etc; i can’t seem to find an answer to my questions, and neither can anyone else. if they do, it would seen that everyone has their own completely unique problem that no one can solve or replicate.

I’ve been going over google page after google page trying different guide and walk-throughs for 3 months now, and each time I run into a new problem each time. I refuse to make a WordPress blog that requires a separate account with someone just for avatars, spam blocking, analytics, email capability, etc. I was up to 20 different accounts and logins just to make my last site work, and I’m done with all that BS.

As simple as ghost is when it works, is there an accurate guide that will actually help me install it and have a working website within the same calendar day?

If you are familiar with Docker, it would be slightly easier. We use Docker to deploy Ghost in reverse proxy setup. It is also easy to upgrade when there is a new Ghost version released.

If you are not comfortable with that, I think some cloud service providers like DigitalOcean let you deploy a new server with Ghost.

I’m completely lost when it comes to Docker. But if I can use a guide to walk through a setup, that’s fine. Skimming your link, I see there’s routing commands for www to non-www and vice versa. Is this a program that handles DNS too? I currently have all my DNS and address routing setup and populated in AWS Route 53. Am I going to have transfers domain hosts?

And I think I’ll stay clear of DigitalOcean anything. That’s the service I see people having the most problems with while I’ve been searching for AWS solutions.

It’s not you… the installation instructions are broken.

I have it running using Unraid, using a docker, and cloudflare as a reverse proxy. The whole setup works great and doesn’t cost me any hosting fees. In fact, there are no fees whatsoever.

Can you give me a run down of what you did to get it all running? I still know what docker or ‘a docker’ is in this context, and reverse DNS is a completely new concept for me.

Unraid is a home storage server that has a nice graphical interface and easy to set up docker as well. I recommend going to YouTube and watching SpaceInvaderOne’s videos on all things Unraid.

It works for me since I built a backup server anyways, otherwise you might want to choose another option.