How to install and try Ghost Blog in your own computer

3 min readJul 9, 2018

Choosing a suitable blogging platform can be daunting… There are so many to choose from such as Ghost, WordPress, Tumblr, Medium, and Blogger.

How do we know if Ghost is a suitable blogging platform for us?

The best way perhaps is to install Ghost Blog locally and try it out to see how well it work for us. So, let’s get started with this guide. 😋

1. Install Node.js

Ghost Blog is powered by Node.js. Hence, we have to download and install Node.js LTS version from the official website.

2. Install Ghost command line tool

Open the terminal and execute the following commands. It will install ghost command line tool using npm package manager.

$ sudo npm install -g ghost-cli

3. Install Ghost locally using command line tool

Navigate to ~/Documents directory and create an empty folder ghost to install Ghost.

$ cd ~/Documents
$ mkdir ghost

Then, navigate into the ghost folder and print current working directory to make sure you are at /Users/[username]/Documents/ghost.

$ cd ghost 
$ pwd
/Users/[username]/Documents/ghost

Next, install local version of ghost.

$ ghost install local

If the installation is successful you should see something like this in your terminal.

4. Setup an admin account

Now copy paste the 2nd URL in the terminal into your browser to setup the admin account for Ghost.
In my case, the URL is

http://localhost:2368/ghost/

You will see the welcome page to setup the Ghost admin account.

After going through the setup process of admin account, you will be able to see the admin dashboard.

5. Try it out!

Congratulations, now you have successfully setup the ghost blog locally! ✌️

Feel free to experiment it out as you like. Try publishing some dummy blog post:

And proceed to http://localhost:2368/ to view your blog posts. In case you haven’t notice, it is the same URL as admin page without the /ghost/.

Boom! The test blog post has been successfully added.

6. Start/Stop the ghost blog

To stop the Ghost blog server, simply head back to the terminal and execute

$ ghost stop

Make sure you are at ~/Documents/ghost/ directory when executing the command above.

Now the Ghost Blog is not available at the URL anymore. To start Ghost again next time, simply go to ~/Documents/ghost/ directory to start the local server.

$ cd ~/Documents/ghost/
$ ghost start

Note: Local installs are not for production

According to Ghost Official Documentation,

Using ghost install local to create a minimal install and then hacking it for production use is an anti-pattern.

Conclusion

Hopefully you are able to decide whether Ghost is a suitable blogging platform for you after playing around with it. 😃

Please let me know how it goes in the comments below. Thank you for reading! 😊