How to install Ghost on a Cloud VPS

Ghost is a modern publishing platform for blogs and newsletters, with built-in memberships, subscriptions and a clean editor.

On your own VPS you get dedicated performance for your site, full root access and none of the compromises of shared hosting.

One-click install on cloudlinux.ro

The fastest way: Ghost installs automatically at the first boot of a new server.

1. Create a Cloud VPS from the control panel.
2. In the configuration step, pick Ghost from the app catalog.
3. Start the server. The install runs in the background for a few minutes and its status shows on the server page.
4. Access details and generated passwords are saved on the server in /root/app-credentials.txt. The app will be available on port 80.

Manual install on any Ubuntu server

If you prefer doing it yourself, below is the exact script our automatic install runs. Execute it as root on a fresh Ubuntu server (24.04 recommended). It stops at the first error, and when it finishes you will find the access details in /root/app-credentials.txt.

export DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive
curl -fsSL https://get.docker.com | sh
DB_PASS=$(openssl rand -base64 24 | tr -dc 'A-Za-z0-9' | cut -c1-20)
IP=$(hostname -I | awk '{print $1}')
docker network create ghost
docker volume create ghost_db
docker volume create ghost_content
docker run -d --name ghost-db --restart=always --network ghost \
  -e MYSQL_ROOT_PASSWORD="$DB_PASS" -e MYSQL_DATABASE=ghost \
  -v ghost_db:/var/lib/mysql mysql:8
docker run -d --name ghost --restart=always --network ghost -p 80:2368 \
  -e url="http://${IP}" -e database__client=mysql \
  -e database__connection__host=ghost-db -e database__connection__user=root \
  -e database__connection__password="$DB_PASS" -e database__connection__database=ghost \
  -v ghost_content:/var/lib/ghost/content ghost:latest
printf 'Ghost: http://%s\nCreeaza contul de administrator la http://%s/ghost\n' "$IP" "$IP" > /root/app-credentials.txt

You can also save this script as a recipe in your account and reuse it on any new server.