(Mis)adventures when installing Ghost CMS on Google Compute Engine

Installing Ghost

At work, I was installing Ghost CMS on Google Compute Engine. Simply following the instructions wasn't 100% enough. Here are the some of the things that needed to be adjusted. I hope it'll be helpful in troubleshooting of other installations :)

Ghost version is 5.45.1, installed through Ghost CLI.
Operating system is Ubuntu 22.04
Node.js version is 16.20.0 (as Node 16 is recommended in Ghost documentation).
Compute Engine instance type is e2-micro, with 10 GB of Balanced type storage. (Update: 1 GB RAM is highly probably not enough, seriously consider use larger RAM size)

Compute Engine settings

If the instance is going to be a regular Web server (for example serving URL blog.mysitename.com), it needs a static external IP (not ephemeral). Also, during Compute Engine instance setup, the firewall needs to be configured to pass HTTP and HTTPS.

MySQL

The instructions tell us to install MySQL:

sudo apt-get install mysql-server

But after installing MySQL, running ghost install and providing an empty password didn't work. I had to set a MySQL root password using mostly these instructions, and then paste the password when running the setup script.

Setting up SSL

Initially I set up Ghost without SSL (during ghost install). Then, after adding instance IP to DNS settings in our DNS provider page, I had to re-run ghost setup ssl several times to make it work without error.

Install library to communicate with Google Cloud Storage

Because we decided to use Google Cloud Storage for storing attached files, I needed to install a plugin for communication with GCS.

As of writing that (April 2023), a library that works is @danmasta/ghost-gcs-adapter, and it needs to be installed using exactly the commands from its documentation, which is here, not as a part of a Dockerfile, but directly in the shell:

export GHOST_INSTALL=/var/www/mysitename-ghost
mkdir -p /tmp/gcs ${GHOST_INSTALL}/current/core/server/adapters/storage/gcs
curl -s "$(npm view @danmasta/ghost-gcs-adapter dist.tarball)" | tar xz -C /tmp/gcs
npm install --prefix /tmp/gcs/package --silent --only=production --no-optional --no-progress
mv /tmp/gcs/package/* ${GHOST_INSTALL}/current/core/server/adapters/storage/gcs

For authentication with Google Cloud Storage, upload the key file in JSON format to /var/www/mysitename-ghost. Then, in the Ghost configuration file, specify connection parameters:

  "storage": {
    "active": "gcs",
    "gcs": {
      "storageOptions": {
        "keyFilename": "mysitename-key-13245314252345.json"
      },
      "bucket": "mysitename-bucket"
    }
  }

RAM

Running ghost doctor says that the instance doesn't have enough RAM, even though everything is installed on a VM with 1 GB of RAM, which is enough according to Ghost documentation. I don't know if it's going to cause problems.

RAM update (May 8)

It seems that the RAM is routinely overfilled. Checking usage of free memory shows that we have hardly any memory left, and we don't have any swap:

$ free -m
               total        used        free      shared  buff/cache   available
Mem:             965         811          64           1          90          34
Swap:              0           0           0

So I followed this instruction about setting up swap:

$ sudo fallocate -l 1.2G /swapfile
$ sudo chmod 600 /swapfile
$ sudo mkswap /swapfile
$ sudo nano /etc/fstab

Then add to /etc/fstab a line: /swapfile swap swap defaults 0 0 line, save and run sudo reboot.

After restarting the instance, we can see that swap is active:

$ free -m
               total        used        free      shared  buff/cache   available
Mem:             965         641          68           0         255         170
Swap:           1228          80        1148

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