Upgrading Ghost

2015-12-03 | 3 min | 432 words | Jonas

I’m not comfortable with the upgrade procedure that’s suggested on the support page “How to Upgrade Ghost”. The following post describes my way of upgrading.

By monitoring the GitHub page you’ll see when there’s a new version released.

Current setup

I’m running my Ghost blog on a Linux Droplet at DigitalOcean and use a somewhat different procedure to upgrade my Ghost blog to the latest release. The setup is on Nginx much like described in this post with the use of Supervisor to keep Ghost as a service.

ls -las in the directory where I keep the blog gives:

total 12
drwxr-xr-x 3 user user 4096 Oct  4 10:59 custom-ghost
lrwxrwxrwx 1 user user   11 Nov 30 08:13 ghost -> ghost-0.7.1
drwxr-xr-x 5 user user 4096 Sep  5 08:17 ghost-0.7.0
drwxr-xr-x 5 user user 4096 Oct  9 11:03 ghost-0.7.1

and a tree custom-ghost gives:

custom-ghost/
├── config.js
└── content
    ├── apps
    ├── data
    │   └── ghost.db
    ├── images
    └── themes
        └── casper
            ├── post.hbs
            ├── post.hbs-0.7.0
            └── post.hbs-0.7.1

6 directories, 8 files

custom-ghost holds the information I want to keep between upgrades, like the config.js, the database in ghost.db and the custom post.hbs¹.

Upgrading

The starting point for the following commands is the directory where I keep my blog.

Backup database

Export the blog settings and data, found under the Labs menu.

Download

$ wget https://github.com/TryGhost/Ghost/releases/download/0.7.2/Ghost-0.7.2.zip

Unzip

$ unzip Ghost-0.7.2.zip -d ghost-0.7.2

Update symlink

$ rm ghost
$ ln -s ghost-0.7.2 ghost

Install

$ cd ghost
$ npm install --production

Symlink config.js

If the there is a config.js it should be deleted, but it is a good idea to check if it or config.example.js has changed in some way (perhaps new parameters etc).

$ rm config.js
$ ln -s ../custom-ghost/config.js .

Symlink customised files

I try to keep the original file as a backup, thus copying it to the custom-ghost structure.

After you’ve symlinked make sure to return to the ghost-directory.

$ cd content/themes/casper/
$ mv post.hbs ../../../../custom-ghost/content/themes/casper/post.hbs-0.7.2
$ ln -s ../../../../custom-ghost/content/themes/casper/post.hbs .
$ cd ../../../

Start

The Supervisor needs to be stopped first, then staring Ghost with npm. This will give a easier way of discovering errors and warnings.

$ supervisorctl stop ghost
$ npm start --production

Restart

Stop the npm with ctrl+c, then start Supervisor.

$ supervisorctl start ghost