Setting up a website based on ghost using fly.io

Your non-tech friend wants their own space on the internet for writing about their passions & showcasing their work. Although platforms like Medium exist, they have a couple of downsides like

• heavy lock-in
• setting a custom domain is behind the medium member paywall (which is 5$ or ~420 rupees per month)
• cannot really customize and emphasize on the taste of the author

Don't get me wrong, they are a fantastic starting point to start writing on the internet and absolutely tick all the fundamental boxes like SEO, a great editor, analytics and many other features. But having a independently owned space on the internet has a lot of perks too.

The ask

So here is what we want to achieve

• custom domain
• theming support, both in terms of structure and colors
• great editor to write drafts and convert them to posts, probably also on mobile
• customizable pages
• low cost, preferably zero

Options

I love next.js (this website is on next.js!), but publishing requires git access and there are not a lot of themes when compared to wordpress or Hugo.

Hugo is another great option, extensive theme support, but content management is out of git. I was exploring datoCMS (which is a continuation of netlify CMS), but setting it up I felt was pretty complex and netlify simplified the setup. But I was using vercel. Forestery was a great option, but they pivoted and made TinaCMS. This workflow is worth exploring as this is truly zero cost. I'll visit this approach later again.

More formal setups like WordPress also exist, but self-hosting WordPress is something I'm not keen on. The relatively newer entry is Ghost which actually looks great!

Ghost actually comes with an excellent plan at around 8$ per month, compared to mediums 5$ you get your own website with strong theming support, sensible defaults and a great editor along with subscription support for around 500 subscribers. Self-hosting is significantly cheaper, albeit technically more work. An instance of ghost can be setup on fly.io for free!

Deploying ghost using fly.io

Let's start by installing the fly.io commandline application. Now create a new folder

mkdir blog
cd blog

login to flyctl

flyctl auth login

Now initialize the ghost docker image using flyctl. Swap 5.69 with whatever version is the latest version found over at DockerHub.

flyctl launch --image=ghost:5.69 --no-deploy

this will ask a couple of questions on name, region etc.. complete them and take a note of the application name. We have included the --no-deploy flag to indicate that its not ready to be deployed yet. There is some configuration pending.

Ghost recommends setting up a MySQL database, but that'll be more complex. Let's just have a sqlite database which is given by default. For the DB, we'll need volumes to store data in. Let's create a 3GB volume for now with the name data

flyctl volumes create data -s 3

Now let's update the fly.toml config to let it know that we intend on using this volume, the URL of the deploy & the port number.

Here is my config post edits

# fly.toml app configuration file generated for chanslens on 2023-10-14T17:46:28+05:30
#
# See https://fly.io/docs/reference/configuration/ for information about how to use this file.
#

app = "blogname"
primary_region = "hkg"

[build]
  image = "ghost:5.69"

[http_service]
  internal_port = 2368
  force_https = true
  auto_stop_machines = true
  auto_start_machines = true
  min_machines_running = 1
  processes = ["app"]

[env]
  url = "https://blogname.com"
  database__client = "sqlite3"
  database__connection__filename = "content/data/ghost.db"
  database__useNullAsDefault = "true"
  database__debug = "false"

[mounts]
  source="data"
  destination="/var/lib/ghost/content"

[[services]]
  internal_port = 2368

Post which deploy can be triggered by

flyctl deploy

once this is complete, the blog should be accessible at https://<blogname>.fly.dev and can be administered fromhttps://<blogname>.fly.dev/ghost

Setting up a custom domain

I usually by domains from namecheap, namecheap gives a simple DNS interface also for the domain. Let's use the same DNS for setting up the custom domain.

Assuming hostname.com is your website of choice, run

flyctl certs add hostname.com

once success, it'll spit out an A record for IPv4 address and another AAAA record for IPv6 address. Set that up for along with an acme challange record on namecheap. Fly will take a short time to verify and then link the domain to the deploy.

Change the hostname in the fly.toml as well to the new custom domain, trigger another deploy and you should be good to go!

What next

Some more items are pending before we can call this complete. Here is an incomplete list

• email for subscriptions & signups
• DB backups: Incase something goes wrong with the volume. Fly.io does provide daily backups, need to restore from one of them to see if it works as expected
• migrating to MySql or postgreSQL instead of using sqlite
• if not, considering liteFS from Fly.io instead of sqlite

That's how easy it is it setup a blog now!