Ghost installed and configured, but not starting

Developer help Self-hosting
21

Hi @markstos I tried taking lsnode out the equation this weekend, but I’m facing two issues: (1) I now can’t get ghost start to run successfully, but it seems ghost run works (which I’m told should only be used for debugging). (2) Properly configuring OpenLiteSpeed to act as a reverse proxy (getting a 503).

I’m still tinkering to see if I can make any progress.

22

I recommend using the built-in support for starting/stopping/managing the service with systemd. systemd starts the service with ghost run. Here’s the summary docs for ghost run:

Run a Ghost instance directly (used by process managers and for debugging)

So while ghost run is used for debugging, it’s also used by process managers like systemd.

If you haven’t already, you can use ghost setup systemd. Once that’s done, standard systemd commands can work on the service, including:

systemctl start 'ghost*'
systemctl status 'ghost*'
systemctl stop 'ghost*'
systemctl restart 'ghost*'
journalctl -u 'ghost*'   # to look at the logs
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23

Hi @markstos I got it working. As mentioned, there were a number of problems, and considering I changed quite a few variables, I’m not 100% sure what actually the mysql issue was, but it’s solved.

  1. I initially installed Ghost in a protected directory to which only the newly created Ghost user had access. I didn’t notice it at first, but the Ghost CLI needed access to that directory and the parent directories, which wasn’t ideal in its current location. So I moved Ghost from /home/blog.example.org to /var/www/blog.example.org.

  2. When I ran ghost install, I included the --no-setup-linux-user flag, because I thought it was going to create another user specific for the Ghost blog, and I already had one. That said, it’s actually creating a ghost user for the Ghost CLI, and perhaps that is helpful to have.

  3. Per your recommendation, I completely scrapped the lsnode part from the guide I followed, and I set up a reverse proxy in OpenLiteSpeed instead:

context / {
  type                    proxy
  handler                 ghost
  addDefaultCharset       off
}

The tricky part here was that I had to create this ghost handler to expose the 2368 port on which Ghost is running. This configuration was added to OpenLiteSpeed in Server Configuration > External App.

  1. Previously, I wanted OpenLiteSpeed to start and run Ghost, because I thought that was the way to go, but per your recommendation, I just switched to using systemd, which I simply enabled/configured during the installation.

And here we are. Ghost is running, it’s using a remote MySQL 8 database, and I can finally sleep.

Thanks again for sticking with me here.

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