How To Install Ghost on CentOS

There is a script that will automatically do the entire installation of Ghost for you which you can find in our One-Click Ghost Install Script for Ubuntu and CentOS article. If you would like to use that, great! If not, this page will describe how to go from a clean CentOS basic server install, to having a Ghost blog running on Node.js

First make sure CentOS is up to date and install some additional packages that will be needed to compile Node.js. To check run

yum update -y
yum install -y wget

Installing Node.js From Source

Run the following commands to install Node.js:

curl -sL https://rpm.nodesource.com/setup | bash -
yum install -y nodejs

Download and Installing Ghost

Download and unpack Ghost with the following commands:

mkdir -p /var/www/
cd /var/www/  
curl -L -O https://ghost.org/zip/ghost-latest.zip  
unzip -d ghost ghost-latest.zip  
cd ghost
sudo npm install --production

Configure Ghost

sudo vi config.example.js

In the "Production" section, change the following:

host: '127.0.0.1',

to

host: '0.0.0.0',

Create Ghost User

useradd ghost
chown -R ghost:ghost /var/www/ghost/

Now to start Ghost, you will need to log into your "ghost" user.

su - ghost
cd /var/www/ghost/

Now that you are logged in with your "ghost" user you can start Ghost:

npm start --production

Browse to http://url_where_ghost_is_installed.com:2368

Proxy to Port 80 and Keep Ghost Running

There you have it, Node.js is installed, Ghost files are located in /var/www/ghost, and Ghost has been started. You can keep Ghost the way it is currently setup if using for a development environment and do not mind adding :2368 to the end of your url. If you are looking for more of a production setup, we would highly recommend you check out the following two articles to help get your Ghost blog ready: