Introduction

In this tutorial, we will use Bitnami containers to run the Ghost blogging platform, taking advantage of Docker features such as linking and volumes.

node

Since Ghost is a node.js application, we will use the node container to run it.

MariaDB

We will link node to a MariaDB container for Ghost to use as it's data store.

nginx

We will serve our Ghost app through an nginx server which we will make accessible to the host machine. nginx will act as a reverse proxy to our node container that will run the Ghost server.

Setting up Ghost

Step 1: Download Ghost

Create an new project directory that will contain our app's content.

mkdir docker-ghost
cd docker-ghost

The latest version of Ghost can be downloaded from GitHub https://ghost.org/.
Download and save the archive in your project directory using your browser, or command line.

curl -LO https://ghost.org/zip/ghost-0.6.4.zip

Next, unzip the archive into a subfolder named ghost in your project directory.

unzip ghost-0.6.4.zip -d ghost

Step 2: Configure Ghost's database credentials

By default Ghost is setup to use a local sqlite database, since we are using MariaDB, we need to change the configuration. We also need to tell Ghost to accept remote connections and use the port exposed by the node container (3000), since we'll be reverse proxying from the nginx container.

Copy or rename the example configuration in the ghost subfolder.

cp ghost/config.example.js ghost/config.js

Next, edit config.js and replace the database and server configuration blocks for production with the following:

database: {
  client: 'mysql',
  connection: {
    host: 'mariadb',
    user: 'root',
    password: 'my-password',
    database: 'ghost'
  },
  debug: false
},
server: {
  host: '0.0.0.0',
  port: '3000'
}

Notice that the hostname we've used for our database connection is mariadb, we will use this when setting up the link between our MariaDB and node containers. We also specify a password and database, which we will pass as environment variables to the MariaDB container.

Creating an nginx virtual host

The next step is to create a virtual host for the nginx container to reverse proxy to our node container. The nginx container contains some example configurations, we will use and modify the node app example.

Step 1: Copy and save the virtual host configuration

Create a subfolder in your project directory for the nginx configuration called nginx-vhost.

mkdir nginx-vhost

Copy and save the text below into nginx-vhost/ghost.conf.

server {
    listen 0.0.0.0:80;
    server_name my-ghost-blog.com;

    location / {
        proxy_set_header X-Real-IP $remote_addr;
        proxy_set_header HOST $http_host;
        proxy_set_header X-NginX-Proxy true;

        proxy_pass http://ghost:3000;
        proxy_redirect off;
    }
}

The hostname we are proxying to is ghost, which we also use when setting up the link between our nginx and node containers.

Using Docker Compose

The easiest way to get up and running is using Docker Compose. It uses one YAML file to define the different containers your application will use, the way they are configured as well as the links between different containers.

Step 1: Install Docker Compose

Follow the guide below to install Docker Compose.

Install Docker Compose

Step 2: Copy Docker Compose definition

Copy the definition below and save it as docker-compose.yml in your project directory.

mariadb:
  image: bitnami/mariadb
  environment:
    - MARIADB_DATABASE=ghost
    - MARIADB_PASSWORD=my-password

ghost:
  image: bitnami/node
  links:
    - mariadb:mariadb
  volumes:
    - ghost:/app
  command: "sh -c 'npm install --production && npm start --production'"

nginx:
  image: bitnami/nginx
  links:
    - ghost:ghost
  ports:
    - 80:80
  volumes:
    - nginx-vhost:/bitnami/nginx/conf/vhosts

In this Docker Compose definition, we used the volumes property to mount the Ghost app and our nginx virtual host.

MARIADB_DATABASE and MARIADB_PASSWORD are environment variables that the MariaDB image takes to setup a database and password for the root user on first run. We used the same credentials we defined in the Ghost config.js file.

Using the links property, we defined links between node and MariaDB, and nginx and node. We used the same hostnames we used earlier when setting up the
database credentials and
nginx virtual host.

Finally, we expose port 80 for nginx to port 80 on the host, allowing us to access Ghost from the host machine.

Step 3: Running Docker Compose

It's really easy to start a Docker Compose app.

docker-compose up

Docker Compose will show log output from all the containers in your application.

Step 4: Access your Ghost instance

To access the server_name we set up in our virtual host, you may need to create an entry in your /etc/hosts file to point my-ghost-blog.com to localhost.

echo '127.0.0.1 my-ghost-blog.com' | sudo tee -a /etc/hosts

Now that everything is up and running, navigate to http://my-ghost-blog.com/ghost or in your browser to access your new Ghost instance!