Ghost Adventures 1

These adventures follow Jean in his quest to get a blog up and running the open source way. The first in the series,tell of how Jean battled to get Ghost working on the OS X platform locally and on Github as static pages.

Battle Duration: 30 mins

Update-25/08/2017
As at writing, Ghost has gained 1.0 status and has an even simpler method of installation.
instead of hopping through the afore mentioned hoops to do a simple local install.

1. npm install -g ghost-cli
2. mkdir <a new directory>
3. ghost install local

The above assumes you have npm already installed to work. After this, you need to install buster and continue as before. See installation steps below.
To start and stop ghost is as simple as ghost start and ghost stop.

Installing necessary tools.

Brew (package manager):

`ruby -e "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/master/install)” && brew update && brew doctor`

Wget (software for retrieving files over http(s),ftp):

brew install wget

Node (platform for building fast,scalable network applications):

brew install node

Python (Programming language):

brew install python

This also installs pip - a tool for installing and managing python packages.

Buster (To generate static pages):

pip install buster

Git (versioning control sytem):

brew install git

Git might already be installed on your system.

Download & Install Ghost

Time to download Ghost - the simple publishing platform this fuss is all about. https://ghost.org/download/

I found it much better to follow this directory structure.

1. Blog{your main folder}

   • Files{subfolder to Blog}

   • Ghost{subfolder to Blog}

mkdir Blog cd Blog mkdir Files mkdir Ghost

Unzip ghost.**.zip into Blog/Ghost.

Change directory to Ghost and run npm install or npm install -—production to install

Then run npm start to get your local server up and running.

Navigated to localhost:2368/ghost This allows you to setup Ghost.
Once logged in , the interface is simply intuitive..

Ghost is up and running.

NB: Posts are written using markdown; a simple markup language.

Setup Git Pages

You need to set up a free Github account and once that is done, you create a new repository with a specific naming convention to allow you have a Github page. Named as such: “username.github.io”

Once you are done writing, you need to create static pages,since Github will only serve static pages.
Hello “Buster”

Publishing

Switch directory to “Files”, the sub-folder under Blog.
Your new repo address must be handy,

In the new folder run buster setup this command prompts for the repo address, below is a sample.Replace “username” with yours and hit enter.

https://github.com/username/username.github.io.git

Once this is done, all you need to run to generate the statics pages is

buster generate —domain=http://127.0.0.1:2368 && buster deploy

This pushes latest changes to Github, and voila you now have a website.

Bear in mind, you need to run buster generate —domain=http://127.0.0.1:2368 && buster deploy after every edit, to push to Github (public). You can view your changes locally,at localhost:2368 before pushing to Github.

Workflow

1. Change your directory to Ghost directory
   • Run npm start in your terminal
2. Open localhost:2368 in browser
3. Edit and/or write post, tweak settings
4. Save
5. Change directory to Files

• run buster generate —domain=http://127.0.0.1:2368
  and buster deploy

6. Done

Repeat 5 - 6 after each post, to generate and publish to Github