Use the Ghost Docker image for your theme's dev environment

Developer help
1

Is it possible to use the official Docker image of Ghost to set up my theme dev environment.

My internet connection is quite bad, doing a fresh install of ghost with the CLI is such a bad experience (Takes easily an entire day if succeeding at all). The Docker image on the other hand… So much better.

I tried to no avail with this command:

docker run -d -e NODE_ENV=development -p 3001:2368 -v $PWD:/var/lib/ghost/current/content/themes/customtheme ghost

I made a symbolic link inside the container.

Is there a correct way to get this done or is it at all possible?

2

Hi, assuming you’re on Windows? Do you have a decent windows machine with 16+GB ram?

  • Use WSL2 Windows Subsystem for Linux with Debian/Ubuntu.
  • Install Docker Desktop for Windows running in/for wsl2 (amazing tech…)
  • Launch Ghost from a Docker Compose in WSL2, mapping the ghost-docker /content directory to a wsl2 directory, accessible in Windows Explorer (!)
  • Bob’s your uncle.

Here’s a docker compose for local dev

1 Like
3

I am using Linux. I have 16+GB RAM.

The docker compose seems to be aimed for production. Still, same issue

Thanks a lot for taking the time to answer me.

4

Hi Jose,
on Linux things are easier, and the Docker Compose is from my dev environment.

Map the Docker-Ghost content folder to a Linux directory and you’re all set.
Create the ghost-content folder, and you also need to set the url: parameter

volumes: 
      - /home/jose/ghost-content:/var/lib/ghost/content

Upload a theme and edit the theme files in…

/home/jose/ghost-content/content/themes/

5

Seems like it doesn’t works. I get this error:
chown: cannot dereference ‘/var/lib/ghost/content/themes/blog-theme’: No such file or directory
Maybe it is a problem with the image version?

6

Suggesting reset of docker environment, export the Ghost content as json (Labs…) and delete all containers and volumes…

docker-compose down
docker rm -f $(docker ps -a -q)
docker volume rm $(docker volume ls -q)

then try again with the external /content directory…

You will have to import your content-json and upload the theme again.

7

I put my theme to a subfolder (like src) in my theme git repository. And if I map this folder to a folder inside docker like /var/lib/ghost/content/themes/{theme_name} then it works perfectly, without needing to upload anything in Ghost dashboard.

Based on @mheland’s docker-compose, here what I have now:

version: '3.7'

services:
  ghost:
    image: ghost:latest
    restart: always
    ports:
      - 2368:2368
    depends_on:
      - ghost-db
    environment:
      database__client: mysql
      database__connection__host: ghost-db
      database__connection__database: ghost-dev-db
      database__connection__user: ghost-dev-user
      database__connection__password: abc123
      NODE_ENV: development
      GHOST_DEBUG: true
      LOG_lEVEL: error
      url: http://localhost:2368
    volumes:
      - ./src:/var/lib/ghost/content/themes/fluid

  ghost-db:
    image: mariadb:latest
    restart: always
    environment:
      MYSQL_DATABASE: ghost-dev-db
      MYSQL_USER: ghost-dev-user
      MYSQL_PASSWORD: abc123
      MYSQL_RANDOM_ROOT_PASSWORD: '1'
    volumes:
      - ghost-db:/var/lib/mysql

volumes:
  ghost-db:
1 Like