How to setup personal blog using Ghost and Github hosting

This was originally posted on my personal blog at https://kushajveersingh.github.io/post_008/

You can check my website at https://kushajveersingh.github.io/ as a reference of what the site looks like.

Note:- I am not an expert in website building. I focus on deep learning research, so there may be some things that may not be needed or are not optimal. But in the end I got the site running which is what matter the most for me.

My system info

1. Ubuntu 20.04 LTS
2. Ghost 3.15.3
3. Yarn 1.22.4
4. Nodejs 12.16.3

Short summary of what we are going to do.

• Install Ghost locally from source
• Use default casper theme to make the website
• Generate a static site using gssg
• Host the static site on Github

Install Ghost locally and it’s dependencies

1. Install NodeJS. (v12 is the recommended for Ghost)

curl -sL https://deb.nodesource.com/setup_12.x | sudo -E bash
sudo apt install -y nodejs

2. Install Yarn

curl -sS https://dl.yarnpkg.com/debian/pubkey.gpg | sudo apt-key add -
echo "deb https://dl.yarnpkg.com/debian/ stable main" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/yarn.list
sudo apt update && sudo apt install yarn

3. Install Ghost from source. (The official setup guide can be found here. Note: Replace KushajveerSingh with your Github username.

git clone --recurse-submodules git@github.com:TryGhost/Ghost
cd Ghost

4. This is a hack. If you follow the official setup guide then you would have forked the Ghost repo and added that as your upstream in the previous step.

I skipped that step, as I was having some problems with that. Instead, I deleted the .git folder and initialized a new github repo for version control.

So go the main Ghost folder and delete .git, .github folder. Then go to core/client and delete the .git folder and submodule file and you are done.

5. Install dependencies (In home directory of Ghost)

sudo npm install
sudo npm install -g knex-migrator
knex-migrator i

6. Make your Ghost folder a github repo.

a)Goto Github and create a new repo where you want to store the Ghost folder.

b)In your Ghost folder run these commands to push it to github.

git init
git add -A
git commit -m 'initial commit'
git remote add origin git@github.com:KushajveerSingh/Ghost.git
git push -u -f origin master

Create the website using Ghost

Use npm start to start the Ghost server. This will open the server at http://localhost:2368.

Goto http://localhost:2368/ghost from where you can start creating your website.

Now create your website locally, and when you are done move to the next step.

Download ghost-static-site-generator

This is the tool that we will use to get a static site out of our Ghost site. You can check the official github repo of the package for more details on the usage.

To download the package run npm install -g ghost-static-site-generator. If you get errors run this command again. I ran this command twice and it worked. Maybe try sudo if it still not works.

Now you can create your static site using gssg --url=https://kushajveersingh.github.io/ and it will create a static folder in your current directory, from where you can copy the contents to your .github.io repo.

Automating the above process

To automate the complete process and ensure that my Ghost repo and .github.io repo are in sync, I created this script.

You need to change only git_folder, ghost_folder and url as per your requirements.

Usage

./generate_script.sh "initial commit"

Your repositories will be pushed to Github with the provided commit message.

You can check my other posts also:

1. Study of Mish activation function in transfer learning with code and discussion
2. All you need for Photorealistic Style Transfer in PyTorch
3. SPADE: State of the art in Image-to-Image Translation by Nvidia
4. Training AlexNet with tips and checks on how to train CNNs