How to host a Ghost 2.0 blog for free on Glitch

Ghost 2.0 is here!

I’ve always liked Ghost as a blogging platform. It’s open source. It runs on Node.js. I even momentarily moved this blog over to Ghost for a little while back in the day.

The only problem is it’s relatively hard to set up hosting for it. You could always just pay the monthly fee, but it’s pretty expensive (as far as blog hosting goes).

But there is a way to set up a Ghost blog on Glitch. Here’s how you do it:

• Go to glitch.com and click New Project -> hello-sqlite. This will start a new Glitch project
• Click the package.json file on the left and then Add Package and search for “ghost” then click it to install
• Create a New File on the left and call it config.development.json with the following in it:

{
  "database": {
      "client": "sqlite3",
      "connection": {
          "filename": "./.data/sqlite.db"
      },
      "debug": true
    },
    "paths": {
      "contentPath": "content/"
    },
    "server": {
      "host": "127.0.0.1",
      "port": 3000
    },
    "url": "https://ghost2.glitch.me"
}

• Replace the ghost2 part in url with the subdomain of your Glitch project (it will be something like lime-hen and you can change it)
• Now we need to make a content folder. The easist way to do this is to click New File and type content/temp.txt then press enter
• Finally, we need to replace the contents of server.js with the following:

const ghost = require('ghost');

ghost()
    .then(function (ghostServer) {
        return ghostServer.start();
    });

And that’s it! You should have a working Ghost blog. If you click on Show up at the top left you should see your new blog.

You can delete all the extra files in public/ etc too.

Also, don’t forget to go to <your-blog>.glitch.me/ghost and set up an admin password etc and write your first post.

Have fun Ghosting!

PS. Here’s one I prepared ealier so you can see the code for yourself (or simply remix it and it should work right out of the box hopefully).