I am following the “download and upload a theme” tutorial. I have Node installed, and the downloaded theme in the directory. Upon calling “npm install”, a huge list of errors appear:
I also have trouble understanding how to setup ghost locally. After completing the tutorial, the link leads to the Ghost Admin, instead of a local application. How do you view changes of your code when it opens a web browser?
Thanks for the help.
Hey Chinestory! Welcome to Ghost.
Can you please tell us which theme, and do an ls (or dir since Windows?) in that directory? There should be a bunch of files (not just one .zip file), and it should include a package.json.
I’m assuming that you’ve already installed Ghost to run locally, and done all its requirements (node, etc), right? Did Ghost start up OK when you did that?
Word of advice: Running on Windows is a pain in the tail. There are lots of spots that just don’t work well, including some that will totally screw up theme development, like missing assets for cards (toggle, bookmark, etc).
You’re going to have a lots better experience if you bail out on that and instead install WSL2, running Ubuntu 22. WSL is a virtual machine. You install it right on your Windows computer, and it lets you run commands on the linux virtual machine. Since the dev team (and lots of us Ghost Experts) all run on Mac (basically Linux) or Linux or in WSL, the docs tend to be better, bugs tend to get squashed faster, and you’re more likely to get useful help on the forum.
Here are directions. Install Node on macOS, Windows, and Linux
Recommendation: If you’ve already installed Node on Windows, uninstall first.
Thank you for the response Cathy.
I am using the Attila theme from this Github link. It looks like it has all the necessary files and a package.json.
I followed your suggestion to transition to mac, and it is working much better. However, calling “npm run dev” and “npm run zip” doesn’t work because the function doesn’t exist. The author of the theme suggests to install grunt and run “grunt build” (which I don’t know the purpose)
I did so and followed through the tutorial (download and upload a theme video), but when refreshing local ghost the Attila theme doesn’t appear. The symbolic link is present and everything seems to be setup correctly.
If you could try this theme yourself I would greatly appreciate it!
Did you activate the theme?
What do you mean? The theme does not appear under installed themes for me to activate.
You restarted Ghost after putting the theme in the themes directory? If you start Ghost with ”ghost run -D” (no quotes) do you see any errors?
Can you screenshot the results of ls -ltr in the themes folder and within the atilla folder?
I ran ls -ltr in the themes folder, and it looks like the symbolic link was not properly connected. I removed the incorrect link and created the correct one. I verified it, restarted ghost, and it is there! I opened the custom-ghost-theme in VS code and I can see the real time edits.
