T.W. Barton
Aug 8, 2017 · 2 min read

Evening,

I messaged Derek and he asked for me to post my question here for the benefit of others. I have been working for a few weeks trying to get this working and created and destroyed countless droplets trying to learn and get up and running however today, I was able to finally get my dual sites up and running with ghost. Oddly enough I found the exact tutorial to get it working on Ghost’s own site. They actually recommend using Ghost on DigitalOcean so the instructions are perfect.

I will warn you that this installs the newest version of Ghost which is 1.5.0 so if you have a theme already purchased check to see if it is compatible or your likely to run into issues. On the other hand, I have been working with Ghost for a few years now and this new version is amazing. It is much more robust and when I went to upload my theme on my site it actually gave me a detailed message box of all the compatibility issues, where to get more information and every file that is affected.

So first step is to create your droplet. Just a basic droplet with no apps installed. I did add a ssh key. Next jump over to the networking menu and add the new ip to your sites so they are pointed to your new droplet.

Next follow this guide to get the initial server setup. https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/initial-server-setup-with-ubuntu-16-04

Now onto the goodness. Follow all these instructions. Note: If your new you should have putty and puttygen installed on your PC. The first is your command line program to run all the commands and the second is used to create ssh keys. It’s also good to figure out what your sudo username and password will be and your Mysql root password. https://docs.ghost.org/docs/install

The most important thing is to pay attention when you’re running the ghost install. You will be asked various questions. If you mess up, as I did a few times, just destroy your droplet and start over. You can run through this all in 20 minutes.

After you have the first site set up and verify that you can get to the site and don’t forget to setup up your account, then setting up the second site takes minutes. Jump back to the guide and start at the “Create a new folder” section and replace “ghost” with your second site. That’s it.

The greatest thing about the Ghost CLI install is that it will install Ghost, the mysql DB, Nginx, and the systemd for each site when you run the install script, assuming you answer the questions correctly :-)

Happy Blogging!

Ty

    T.W. Barton

    Written by