Ghost is a nicely designed, simple, and free blogging platform. It's an open source and easy to use Content Management System(CMS) built exclusively for blogging. After installing Ghost on Windows, you can get to know about its useful and unique features. You can use Ghost to easily create, edit, and publish your blog posts over the Internet. Compared to WordPress, Ghost is quite new but its popularity is growing by the day and is expected to be a great choice for bloggers. It has an impressive user interface which is very intuitive for a newbie.
Almost all popular CMSs are written in PHP language. Since Ghost is built to run on Node.js, it is written in JavaScript language. JavaScript is required to build applications like Ghost which run on Node.js. As Ghost is based on Node.js, it is likely to be fast and scalable.
Installing Ghost from its source code seems a bit tricky at first, but is easier than you think. In this tutorial we will show you how to install Ghost on Windows 8 or Windows 7 with screenshots. (Tested to work on Windows 7 and Windows 8.1)
To install ghost, you need to have Node.js installed on your computer. Click here for a tutorial on how to install Node.js on Windows.
It's time to show you the steps to setup Ghost Blog on Windows.
1) Download the Ghost Source Code
The first step is to download the Ghost source code. For that, you will need to Sign Up at ghost.org. So, sign up and download the Ghost source code. The name of the downloaded file might be something like ghost-x.y.z.zip, where x, y, and z denote the version numbers.
2) Create a Folder in C: drive (C:\ghost)
The next step is to create an empty folder in C: drive. You can name the folder as "ghost", "ghostblog", "ghostcms", etc. In this tutorial, we have named the folder as "ghost", and placed it inside the C: drive. The path to the "ghost" folder is "C:\ghost". After that, extract the contents of the downloaded zip file inside the newly created "C:\ghost" folder. The contents of the "ghost" folder looks as shown in the image.
3) Installing Ghost
Change directory to the ghost folder in Command Prompt.
Open Command Prompt, and change the current working directory to "C:\ghost". Use the command shown below to do it. If your folder name is different, change the directory path in the command to match yours.
cd "C:\ghost"
The working directory will change as shown in the image below.
The next command will install Ghost after downloading its requirements.
This step requires your computer to be connected to Internet. So, before doing this step check whether your computer is connected to Internet or not. Now, type the command shown below and press the Enter key. This command will download and install the Node.js modules which are needed to install Ghost.
npm install --production
You will see the Node.js Package Manager(NPM) downloading and installing the Ghost dependencies.
NPM install process completed.
Note: The "npm install" command installs a package and it's dependencies. Here, the package is the "ghost" folder which is described by the "package.json" file. If you open the "ghost" folder, you can see a file named "package.json" inside it. The dependencies(Node.js modules which are required for Ghost) are listed in this file.
Node.js Package Manager(NPM) will create a folder named "node_modules" and download the required Node.js modules inside it.
The flag "--production" in the command "npm install --production" makes sure that the Node.js modules listed in "devDependencies" in the package.json file are not downloaded and installed. The Node.js modules listed in "devDependencies" are not required if you are not developing the source code of the Ghost core.
4) Start Ghost
Ghost is now ready to be started. Type "npm start" in the Command Prompt, and press the Enter key. It starts Ghost in development mode. It also shows the message "Listening on 127.0.0.1:2368".
npm start
Note: You can use “npm start –production” to start Ghost in production mode. But it is recommended to start in the development mode while you are developing your Ghost blog locally on your computer.
5) Access your Ghost blog from a web browser
Open a web browser, type http://127.0.0.1:2368 in the address bar, and press the Enter key. You will see your Ghost blog's homepage. You may use http://localhost:2368 in place of http://127.0.0.1:2368 to access your Ghost blog.
6) Enter your details (email, password, etc.) for your Ghost blog
Now, browse to http://127.0.0.1:2368/ghost. The browser will be redirected to http://127.0.0.1:2368/ghost/signup. Here you can create your Ghost Administrator account. You must remember the Email Address and Password entered here. This will be required for future logins. Ghost uses an SQLite database to store information by default. You can change to MySQL or some other supported database later. Currently, only one administrator is allowed in Ghost.
After sign up, if you see the Ghost Admin dashboard as shown below, Ghost has been installed successfully. The Admin dashboard is sleek and simple. If you want, you can click on the "+NEW POST" link at the top to write your first Blog post.
Next time, when you want to log in, you can access the log in page at http://127.0.0.1:2368/ghost/signin. Before that, you must start Ghost from the Command Prompt by using the command "npm start" in the "C:\ghost" directory. To shut down Ghost from Command Prompt, press Ctrl + C.
Related:
How to install a theme in your Ghost blog?
