Zero to Ghost blog hero in under 30 minutes

Simon Bruce

• 1 min read

I've been playing around with Node JS a little bit lately and at the same time had finally decided that I needed a blog to show off and record some stuff that I have been working on in my very meagre spare time.

I then found Ghost which solved both twitches at the same time. Even better, all of the content is written in Markdown which for me is a total win-win as I think Markdown is fantastic for writing and go to great lengths to enable myself to write things in Markdown when ever possible.

I went ahead and started installing it on my notebook. I already had the basics (node js and npm) installed so it was very easy. I then started looking into installing it on my Rackspace cloud server when I found an article talking about a great new Rackspace feature called deployments. If you want to get a specific product up and running very quickly and don't want to or need to do it yourself then it is a really quick way to get it up and running straight away. Basically it works like this

  1. Log into your Rackspace account.
  2. Click on Deployments.
  3. Type in a name for for the deployment.
  4. Select a region to host the server.
  5. Select the application to be deployed (in my case Ghost).
  6. Type in any additional information required by the application - in the case of Ghost it just requires a URL.
  7. Hit "Next Step" and then select the size of the cloud server to create.
  8. Wait for about 5 minutes.
  9. Once it has finished, the IP address for the new cloud server and use those to create a new DNS record for it pointing at the URL that you used when setting it up.
  10. Once the DNS has propagated then you are done.

Although I think that I will eventually redo this, this did save me a good chunk of time which is what really matters in the short term.

Thanks for reading.