How to Install Ghost Blogging Platform on Your Mac

Note: This article was first published on: Oct 24, 2013.

Ghost.org is a blogging platform created by John O’Nolan and further developed with the help of Hannah Wolfe. It began as a Kickstarter project and managed to raise more than $300,000 in funding. Well-known tech and blogging companies like WooThemes and Envato supported the project.

The main goal of Ghost is to simplify the blogging process and make it visually appealing. Unlike WordPress, which has grown to be a tool for building various types of websites, Ghost focuses solely on being a platform for blogging.

In the following article, we’ll guide you step-by-step on how to install Ghost on your personal computer.

Requirement

We need Node.js version 0.10.* (the current stable release) to be able to run Ghost. Node.js installation package is available for Windows, Mac, and Linux. Download it here, and install it.

If you have installed Node.js before, verify the version with this command in the Terminal: node -v. At the time of the writing, my Node.js installation was outdated, so I need to update it first.

Thanks to a tip by Simon Holmes, updating Node.js is so easy. We run the following set of command lines, then wait for a while for the installation process to complete.

 sudo npm cache clean -f
 sudo npm install -g n
 sudo n stable
 

Let’s verify the version once again.

As you can see above, Node.js 0.10.21 has been installed, and we are all set to install Ghost.

Installing Ghost

You can download Ghost from the official website or from the Github repo.

We will be using command line and Terminal to install Ghost. Ghost does not come with a step-by-step installation guide like in WordPress or other blogging platforms/CMS that you might have come across. So it might not tougher on those who rarely work with Terminal and command line.

Open Terminal and navigate to the Ghost folder that you have just extracted, for example: cd ~/your/path/to/ghost/folder. And run these two commands:

 npm install --production
 npm start
 

Your Ghost blog should now run.

You can access your Ghost blog in 127.0.0.1:2368 URL within the browser.

Ghost Back-end Admin

Go to 127.0.0.1:2368/ghost. For the initiation, input your name, email, and password. Once that is done, you will be redirected to the back-end administration, where you can write, edit, and publish post. The layout is minimal yet refreshing.

Hit the + New Post button to start creating a new post.

Ghost uses MarkDown. You can head over to our previous post to learn how to write using MarkDown.

Final Thought

Ghost is a new blogging platform with a very active development, and they plan to add a bunch of new features in the next version. At the time of the writing, Ghost is missing several trivial features for a blog. First, you can only assign Tags for the post; there is still no way to manage post by category. The Tag archive however is not yet accessible – you cannot sort posts that are saved under Tags on the front-end. Plus, we cannot schedule post, and comment to the post as well.

Despite all that, I’m looking forward to how this new platform will grow, and things that will be built around it in the next couple of years.