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Update Ghost blog on Webfaction

Posted on:June 20, 2018 at 10:44 PM

Since Webfaction started to support Ghost I obviously jumped on board, and after years (I don’t know many) I am still an aficionado user.

I remember with pain the years of Ghost 0.x, actually the real problem was (is?) how Webfaction is dealing with the one-click applications, it’s super easy to install them but it’s a mess to update them. I remember back in the days spending ages, after every update, trying to re-set live my blog.

Then ghost 1.x arrived, and a lot of changes happened, one of my favourites was the introduction of ghost-cli the command line to install, update and, in general, control ghost.

In Webfaction every “app” is sandboxed, basically, every app folder has a bin/ folder containing all the commands that you can need, start, stop, and in the case of Ghost, npm and the ghost-cli itself (ghost). The problem, in this case, is that sooner or later that ghost-cli is going to be outdated. So, my suggestion is to install npm globally for your user and then install a fresh version of ghost-cli.

In order to do that you need node and npm available to your user. There are a bunch of different ways to achieve this, personally, the one I find the best is using n. n is a Node version manager and it could be easily installed via bash curl -L https://git.io/n-install | bash.

Once we have node installed nothing can stop us from installing ghost-cli :)

We still have a little hassle to resolve, most likely when you are going to run ghost update, you will find a funny error saying:

1) SystemError

Message: The path /home/{yourUser)/ is not readable by other users on the system.
This can cause issues with the CLI, please either make this directory readable by others or install node and Ghost-CLI in another location.

The problem here is that we don’t have permission to write in the home nor in the webapps folder, so the easiest way to get around this problem is to use the flag --no-setup-linux-user.

That should be enough, if our blog is getting down after this update it’d be enough running ghost start --no-setup-linux-user to have it up and 🚀.