How to Install Ghost on Namecheap

1. Head over to Namecheap and sign up for their VPS service (I did VPS Lite - Xen)
2. Register, transfer, or use an existing Namecheap domain name.
   

3. Under "Operating System" select "Ubuntu 12.04". Leave the rest the same.

4. Go ahead and go through the Checkout steps

5. Once finished with the checkout, you will have to wait for the email from Namecheap saying your VPS is setup.

6. Once you receive the email, it will have SSH instructions in it. Use those instructions to gain ssh access to your VPS

   ssh root@[ip address provided]
   

7. Update Ubuntu:

   sudo apt-get update
   sudo apt-get upgrade
   sudo aptitude install build-essential zip
   

8. Download and install Node.js

   curl -sL https://deb.nodesource.com/setup | sudo bash -
   sudo apt-get install -y nodejs
   

9. To install Ghost you need to sign into your Ghost account at ghost.org and get the URL for the latest Ghost source code

   cd /var/www/
   wget https://ghost.org/zip/ghost-latest.zip
   unzip -d ghost [Name-of-Ghost-zip].zip    
   cd ghost/
   sudo npm install
   

10. Edit the config.js file

    cp config.example.js config.js
    sudo vi config.js
    

    In the "Production" section, change the following:

    host: '127.0.0.1',
    

    to

    host: '0.0.0.0',
    

    save and exit.

11. Namecheap seems to have apache running by default, so we need to kill that to run Ghost

    ps aux | grep apache
    

    this will output something like this root 582 0.0 1.7 197888 8684 ? Ss 19:35 0:00 /usr/sbin/apache2 -k start. The first number (582 in my case) is what you will use in the next command:

    sudo kill 582
    

12. Now lets stop apache from starting everytime the server reboots:

    sudo update-rc.d -f  apache2 remove
    

13. Create Ghost User:

    sudo adduser --shell /bin/bash --gecos 'Ghost application' ghost
    sudo chown -R ghost:ghost /var/www/ghost/
    

14. Log into Ghost User:

    su - ghost
    cd /var/www/ghost/
    

15. Start Ghost:

    npm start --production
    

16. Browse to the IP address that was provided in the email Namecheap sent you with :2368 at the end (ex. 123.456.78.901:2368) and you should see Ghost up and running!

Proxy from 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 you do not mind adding :2368 to the end of your url, but we would highly recommend you check out the following two article to help get your Ghost blog production ready:

Possible Errors

1. Error: listen EADDRINUSE

   This means the port you are trying to run Ghost on is in use. Check step 11 above.