Docs: https://hub.docker.com/_/ghost/

The Hello World version

Connect to your Lightsail instance and create a path for the Ghost content. I created separate paths for each blog hosted on my Lightsail instance so they can be managed independently.

mkdir -p ~/websites/cronspam.org/content

Then launch the Docker image for Ghost. This will automatically pull the Docker image from Dockerhub:

docker run -d \
  --name blog \
  -e url=http://cronspam.org \
  -p 80:2368 \
  -v /home/ec2-user/websites/cronspam.org/content:/var/lib/ghost/content \
  ghost:3

You can visit the new site at: http://cronspam.org

And the admin page is at /ghost: http://cronspam.org/ghost/

WARNING: Go to the admin page ASAP to create the admin account, until you do it's available for anyone to claim - the first visitor becomes the admin!

Using docker-compose

First, install docker-compose. It's always annoying that it's not part of the official Docker tools (yes, I know why, and it's still annoying).

# Install `docker-compose` from Docker
sudo curl -L \
  https://github.com/docker/compose/releases/latest/download/docker-compose-$(uname -s)-$(uname -m) \
  -o /usr/local/bin/docker-compose

# Fix the permissions
sudo chmod +x /usr/local/bin/docker-compose

# Verify it works
docker-compose version

Created a ~/websites/cronspam.org/cronspam.org.yaml Docker compose file to configure the Docker container. I created a separate Docker compose file for each blog hosted on my Lightsail instance so they can be managed independently.

# By default, the Ghost image will use SQLite (and thus requires no separate database container)

version: '3.1'

services:

  ghost_cronspam:
    container_name: ghost_cronspam
    image: ghost:3
    restart: always
    ports:
      - 80:2368
    volumes:
       - /home/ec2-user/websites/cronspam.org/content:/var/lib/ghost/content
    # See: https://docs.ghost.org/docs/config#section-running-ghost-with-config-env-variables
    environment:
      url: http://cronspam.org

Run the compose file:

docker-compose -f ~/websites/cronspam.org/cronspam.org.yaml up --detach