Uttery Lost with Custom Domain Setup

Developer help Self-hosting
1

This has been an unbelievably frustrating experience for me as I’ve spent over 12 hours trying to get my ZimaBlade working with Ghost.

I am not familiar with Linux or any of the setup and I cannot for the life of me get my URL that’s on Cloudflare to point to this blog. There’s no option to setup a Domain ANYWHERE in the Ghost Admin settings like everyone keeps talking about in the documentation. The DNS settings that I’ve been provided are not working.

I tried setting it up with CloudFlare Tunnels and that has worked to a degree, but the any time I want to go back to my homepage the URL is Localhost and the Port that I am accessing the website from.

Any DETAILED INSTRUCTIONS on what to do would be greatly appreciated. I am so sick and tired of reading article after article that does not help me at all, and quite frankly I’m ready to just be done with all of this if I can’t get it figured out.

2

Welcome to Ghost!

I get the frustration. Figuring these things out is part of self hosting though.

If you’re not familiar with Linux that is a bit of a challenge, indeed, but I feel like you’re like 95%.

That just sounds like your configuration needs some adaption. How did you set up Ghost? With the Ghost CLI or a Docker-based approach?

What you’ll need to change is the url property in your configuration, which likely points to http://localhost``:PORT, rather than your actual domain:

If you tell us more about your setup, we can help you with the specific steps.

3

I think that’s where I’m really getting into trouble. I’ve installed it through the CasaOS App Store on my ZimaBlade. From my understanding that makes it a Docker-based approach, but again with my limited understanding of Linux I’m not 100% sure that’s the case.

4

Got it. In that case, you should have a setting somewhere in the Ghost configuration of CasaOS called url. That’s where you’d need to put your domain in (with https).

Not entirely sure where in CasaOS that is, but it has to have some form of configuration options :smiley:

One note though: Ghost has released Ghost 6 on Monday, with two features (social web and traffic analytics) that will need a more complex setup than just a Ghost container and a database. There are self hosting instructions available, but CasaOS is not an officially supported installation method, meaning that the instructions for that will not be available from Ghost’s side. That is something the CasaOS community will need to figure out.

5

That has unfortunately been my issue ass well. I can’t seem to find it and was hoping that someone would be able to know if it’s in a specific directory.

I think I’m going to give this a try if I can’t find out/someone points me to where the config files are

6

I don’t think it is in a directory. Based on a quick video I saw about CasaOS, you’d have configuration option within the UI.

Somewhere in CasaOS you have defined/installed Ghost. I’d start by going back there and looking for options and a field called url.

7

I have looked, there’s not.

I’m quickly realizing that CasaOS is NOT very good.

8

I have heard great things about CasaOS, but admittedly, I would not use it to host something like Ghost on it.

Unfortunately, I am also out of suggestions then. Maybe somebody else has idea.

And if you’re keen on experimenting, I recommend the new Docker Compose setup. However, self-hosting will always come with challenges and things to figure out, so that’s just something to keep in mind.

1 Like
9

So, meant in the kindest way possible: Is self-hosting something you want to learn? Do you want to learn Linux server admin, or do you just want a blog and newsletter website? Self-hosting is absolutely not for everyone, and if you value your time at a reasonable rate, you might decide that needing only a minute to having a ghost install up and running was worth the cost of managed hosting.

If Ghost Pro is not in budget, have a look at Magic Pages (run by @jannis :backhand_index_pointing_up: ), or Synaps Media (@muratcorlu ). Or for really cheap but not fully managed, Pikapods (but I’m not sure that activitypub or analytics will be available there, and getting email configured is tricky).

2 Likes
10

I’m not familiar with CasaOS as well, but I just made a quick search and found a video from 1 year ago telling how to install Ghost on CasaOS. And there is a section about setting Ghost URL on CasaOS UI:

But I would also like to mention that, to have a proper Ghost experience -depending to your needed feature set- you will need to configure many more things (SSL, email, CDN, ActivityPub, Tinybird, backing up your content and updating Ghost regularly). If self-hosting is not a principal decision or a fun for you, probably spending a few coffee price monthly on a managed hosting, will give you much more fun :blush:

2 Likes