[blfr]

I was just thinking about ghost a few weeks ago! I used to use Ghost way back when and wanted to get back to it but the installation process has become really complex and brittle. I'm a little ashamed to admit that it beat me.

The cli tool is very rigid. For some reason you cannot simply run ghost as the user ghost but you need some other user with sudo privileges to create the ghost user during the installation process. And if there's any problem at any point, it just breaks.

I will try the npm path[1] but it looks pretty arduous as well.

Is this a business decision to turn as many people as possible to the hosted version? Or is this just the state of node and modern web apps?

[1] https://docs.ghost.org/docs/using-ghost-as-an-npm-module

[erisds]

> Is this a business decision to turn as many people as possible to the hosted version? Or is this just the state of node and modern web apps?

Ghost-CLI is an open source project, led and built almost entirely by contributors from the community.

The process is rigid because they don't have enough hands to support more variations in environment.

[axxl]

Digital Ocean has a one click install that configured a ghost blog and takes care of everything for you.

[blfr]

I'm so old I still have a multi-purpose personal server instead of separate VPS/containers for everything.

[CM30]

Honestly, I suspect most people use either traditional hosting or a personal server for their sites. The separate containers on VPS providers thing is significantly overrepresented on sites like Hacker News, and likely counts for why many scripts (not just Ghost) haven't quite cracked the mainstream yet.