How to Install Node.js Ghost Blog Platform
Table of Contents
Introduction
Ghost is a blog platform that runs on a Node.js web server. It can run on any machine — Windows, Mac, or Linux. As of August 2015, around 743,155 people had downloaded Ghost. In this article, I'll show how to download and install it on your local computer.
The target system is Windows 7 64-bit.
The required software is the following:
- [node.js - node-v0.12.7-x64.msi
ghost-0.6.4.zip](https://nodejs.org/download/)
Install Node.js
Install Node.js on your machine.
Download and Extract Ghost
After downloading the ghost-0.6.4 zip file, move it to the folder where you want to host the blog. In my case, I moved it to C:\WebApps.
Run Ghost
Run Ghost using the Node.js command prompt. After running these commands, your Ghost blog system should be available at localhost:2368 by default.
C:\WebApps\ghost-0.6.4>npm install --production
C:\WebApps\ghost-0.6.4>npm start
More Information
Ghost runs on Node.js as the web server and server-side programming language, and uses Handlebars.js as the client-side template language. Ghost also has a development kit. For more information about the developer API, see https://github.com/TryGhost/Ghost/wiki/Imagining-the-Ghost-Developer-Kit.
Conclusion
Installing Ghost is a straightforward process: install Node.js, download and extract Ghost, and run npm install --production followed by npm start. Once set up, Ghost provides a clean and powerful Markdown-based blogging platform.