Surfing With Ghost on Digital Ocean

Getting Started with Ghost on Digital Ocean

I was able to get my Ghost blog up and running in under 10 minutes using a fantastic service provided by Digital Ocean called Droplets. There is a very detailed guide provided by Hannah Wolfe that delves into how to get your Ghost Droplet setup. Digital Ocean's checkout process is dead simple and the entire website is remarkably well designed. I am using the smallest available instance which is $5 a month for a 1 core instance with a 20 GB SSD!

I get a sweet little Ubuntu machine for $5 a month to host my blog. I am interested in customizing the Casper theme to match the color scheme of my existing blog. (If you are on mac) Jump into terminal and run the following command to copy your entire blog over to your local machine:

	scp -r root@<your ip address>:/var/www/ghost/ /tmp

scp stands for secure copy and works very simlarly to the cp command. You have to add -r when copying directories.

My ghost website is located on the Ubuntu instance at /var/www/ghost. Meaning if you ssh into the Ubuntu instance you have to go to /var/www/ghost to see your websites files.

After running the scp command I now have a local copy of my Ghost blog. Let's figure out if it's using MySQL or SQLite for storage. Open config.js in the root of the tmp/ghost folder. I see the following line client: 'sqlite3', in the production section of the file so I know my Ghost blog is using sqlite for storage. On the next line I can see the database is stored at /content/data/ghost.db. Since this is sqlite I can copy this 1 file to backup my ghost blog!

	scp -r root@<your ip address>:/var/www/ghost/content/data/ghost.db /tmp