Background

I had a reason to see if I could get Ghost running alongside this WordPress install today, and it turns out that once you follow the correct and up-to-date instructions, it’s quite simple. I run Apache rather than nginx, so the default instructions don’t work. The magic happens with the RequestHeader line and the whole https component of the VirtualHost looks like this:

    <VirtualHost *:443>
            ServerAdmin webmaster@localhost

            ServerName ghostblog.domain

            ErrorLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/error.log
            CustomLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/access.log combined

           ProxyPass / http://127.0.0.1:2368/
           ProxyPassReverse / http://127.0.0.1:2368/
           ProxyPreserveHost On
           RequestHeader Set X-Forwarded-Proto "https"


            Include /etc/letsencrypt/options-ssl-apache.conf
            SSLCertificateFile /etc/letsencrypt/live/ghostblog.domain/fullchain.pem
            SSLCertificateKeyFile /etc/letsencrypt/live/ghostblog.domain/privkey.pem
    </VirtualHost>

There’s also the redirect from http to https but I do that in a separate VirtualHost with a permanent redirect. Without the RequestHeader line, you end up with a lot of internal redirects when you try to access the site over https.

Following the official installation works well, and if it detects that nginx isn’t installed, Ghost-CLI will let you skip that part of the configuation and it trusts that you’ll figure it out some other way.

Ghost-CLI also performs the database configuration and stuff for you, assuming you know the/a MySQL username and password on your server.

Thoughts

I only had a cursory look inside Ghost and my first thought is that it’s so quick. Really, really quick. I’m tempted to move this site there. Or maybe I’ll make bitterswede.com a thing in Ghost and slowly migrate across. The main thing that’s getting in the way of moving over is that I’ve used a theme called Divi which I suspect has inserted a lot of garbage into posts made with the Divi Builder.

One day, maybe.

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