Hello! I’m new to this, I just got my ghost install working a couple hours ago, and it’ll be a great way for me to run my own little blog.
My current problem is two-fold. I can’t see a preview of the site while in my Admin menu’s Design & Branding menu, all I get is a blank white page where the preview should be. I figured that maybe this was a browser issue (I use firefox, and things just don’t work frequently enough), so I switched to Arc to see if it worked there before more troubleshooting, but I now can’t sign into my admin account on Arc, or Firefox for that matter. I have the one tab open where I’m signed in, but if I try and open it in a new window or browser, I get the login page, I put in the correct email and password, and then it just hangs for about 100 seconds before the website just says “there was a problem on the server.”
Checking logs, I think it’s failing to find something, logs for the chain of events are as follows:
I’m running Ghost in a docker container on an Unraid server, and I don’t plan on using mail for anything, so hopefully that isn’t the root cause of the error.
The preview problem is obviously secondary to the fact that I can’t log in, I can deal with that one later. I don’t want to close my signed-in admin window until this is resolved, because I worry that I might lose access to it completely if it closes, as I can’t currently sign back in.
Just found a line buried in the settings about how I’m using an unsupported MySQL version (9.3 is too new or something) so I’m going to change that and see if that fixes it.
That, in fact, did not fix it. The MySQL docker container I’m using refused to work on anything but the “latest” version, which is (according to it) 9.3.
I could be wrong but I think you have to have some kind of mail set up so that ghost can send verification codes, for example if you are logging in from a new device that ghost doesn’t recognize, it would send you an email with a verification code you have to enter. If you don’t have mail set up, then ghost can’t do that.
Perhaps when you tried to log in from a new browser (Arc), ghost recognized it as a new device that needed authentication.
You mentioned you don’t plan on using mail for anything, so I’m not sure if you set it up during your install, but in case you didn’t, maybe try adding some kind of outgoing mail server settings to your config to see if you can authenticate to get logged in.
I’m using a docker container in Unraid, so none of my initial configuration was done through the Ghost CLI, and I’m not actually sure I even have access to the Ghost CLI.
Unraid has a Command Line button per docker container to address it directly, but the one on this container doesn’t seem to do anything. I don’t know what commands I should be using, but I get no response when I try any of the standard linux commands.
On top of this, I can’t find any config files in the docker appdata folder or MySQL database, so it isn’t as simple as going in and changing the bits in some file somewhere.
I even set up Mailgun in the hopes that might help, but I think those are totally separate pieces of the puzzle.
I did, however, just get this error (which is new, and only showed up once), so that essentially confirms that the problem is what we think it is; I just don’t know how to get to the config so I can change it.
For docker, you typically set environment variables instead of having a config file. I’m not sure that’s the case with Unraid, but that’d be my first guess. :)
The main and primary problem I realized as I was nearing the end of my troubleshooting is that I don’t have port 465 forwarded, and beyond that, I can’t forward any ports. All of my traffic travels through Cloudflare tunnels, and I don’t care enough about email verification to see if those support SMTP or set up another one right now.
I managed to get access to the docker’s actual terminal through unraid’s terminal, and then once I was in, I had to install vim, but I was able to edit the file directly and add the necessary clauses. I’m glad I figured this out, because there are a number of config things I wanted to activate but didn’t have access to before.
I did end up disabling staff device verification, because of the situation my server is in, I can’t send those emails, and I’m not that worried about getting hacked, I’m just some nobody on the internet, and there won’t be anything super personal or private on the site.
I still only see blank white when I load the design page, but I will go find or start another thread about that, so as not to balloon something where the titular issue has been resolved. Thank you everyone for your help!