Nice, it works
Published: 13 Mar 15
This is the first post on my new ghost blog which is being hosted on a quad-core Raspberry PI Model B 2. The PI is running in my house plugged into the mains and my home router. I've measured a power draw of 1-2W meaning that this is going to be very cheap to run all year around 24/7.
Linux Distribution
For my OS I picked Arch Linux ARM which comes as a minimal base image with no additional UI components. It was the perfect choice for a server and I followed the instructions here: Arch Linux ARM installation instructions.
I went through these steps after preparing the SD card:
- Opened a port on my router to enable the outside world to view the blog. This may read as port forwarding or NAT on your router's admin page.
- Installed the
base-develpackage which gives a full build-chain for C. This is need to compile the Node.js module for SQLite. - Installed the Node.js for ARMv7 binary to
/usr/local/ - And then some of the usual tasks such as setting up a host name etc
Example installation:
pacman -Sy base-devel nodejs
wget https://ghost.org/zip/ghost-latest.zip
cd /var/www/
unzip ghost-latest.zip
npm install --production
npm start --production
And it worked, first time!
But wait..
What happens if there is an exception or error and the node.js process terminates? Well: "there is an app for that" (tm).
Use Node's package manager npm to install either pm2 or forever these tools daemonize your node process and automatically restart it if it runs into any issues.
npm install --global pm2
Once installed start the ghost blog like this:
export NODE_ENV=production
pm2 start index.js --name ghost
To view the status of the process pm2 list and to kill the process pm2 kill.
The output gives the total memory used, times the application had to restart and the total uptime. For a very cool live view similar to 'top' type in pm2 monit.
So once pm2 is managing your blog, you shouldn't need to make any changes to the installation. The only other thing you may want to do is to specific a startup task in crontab/init or systemd so that if you get a power-outage the blog will restart.
and..
Beware that self-hosting on your own hardware and connection is not without its risks.
- Someone could turn off your machine by accident (yes this happened) to me
- the SD card could become corrupted (this happened to me)
- your connection could go down (again has happened) or even the electricity during a power-cut.
While cloud hosting can provide a reliable and economical alternative, this certainly was a very educational and rewarding journey. I learnt a lot during the process and I hope you will try it out too.
Any questions/suggestions?
- Do you run a blog on your Raspberry PI?
- Have you got a neat suggestion?
Or for any other related topic, please post a comment.
Update 12 months on:
Host your Ghost blog in 5 minutes on Raspberry PI or a regular PC/VM using Docker: