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Host a Ghost Blog for Free on Fly.io -- In 1 Minute

Posted by Curiositry on May 18th, 2022 Tagged Tech, Ghost, Hosting,
Free, Fly.io, Blog
Host a Ghost Blog Free on Fly.io

Ghost is one of the fastest-growing publishing platforms. However,
for those looking to dip their toes in the water, one aspect can be
off-putting: the shiny Ghost(Pro) hosting (referral link) starts at
$11/month or $108/year -- $300/year a year if you want to use your own
theme -- and even if you self-host on a VPS that will set you back
around $5/month or $60 a year^1

For years, I have hosted this blog on Heroku's free tier. It was a
bit involved to get set up, and the in-depth tutorial I wrote still
gets traffic. However, when Ghost phased out PostgreSQL support, and
Heroku changed their free tier, it became much more difficult.^2

A little while ago, I ran across Fly.io on HackerNews^3. It looked
like it could run Ghost, and has a generous free tier. When it came
time to find a better home for my Ghost blogs, I decided to give it a
shot. There are several good tutorials out there, and the process
only took about half an hour. I was happy. But what if the process
took 30 seconds instead of 30 minutes?

Here is a single copy-and-pasteable command^4 that will spin up a
fully functional Ghost blog on Fly.io in less than two minutes^5:

# Prompt for app name
read -p "Enter App Name: " appname </dev/tty && \
# Heredoc wrapper for tidyness (starting now, because we can't seem to prompt for input within heredoc)
bash << EOF
# Inspect script first if you are leery of pipe-to-bash
curl -L https://fly.io/install.sh | sh
# This will open a browser, where you can enter a username and password, and your credit card (which is required even for free tier, for fraud prevention).
flyctl auth signup
# Create a directory for the project and enter it, since the next command will output a file
mkdir ghost-flyio && cd ghost-flyio
# Create an app -- using Ghost Dockerfile, Seattle region, and app name prompted for earlier -- but don't deploy it
echo | flyctl launch --name $appname --image=ghost:4-alpine --region sea --no-deploy
# Provision a volume for Ghost's content and SQLite Database.
# Size can be up to 3GB and still fit in the free plan, but 1GB will be enough for starters.
flyctl volumes create ghost_data --region sea --size 1
# Install sed (stream editor), if it isn't already installed
sudo apt install sed
# Update the port to Ghost's default (2368)
sed -i 's/internal_port = 8080/internal_port = 2368/g' fly.toml
# Append info about where to find the persistent storage to fly.toml
cat >> fly.toml << BLOCK
[mounts]
  source="ghost_data"
  destination="/var/lib/ghost/content"
BLOCK
# Boom! We're airborne.
flyctl launch
# End our bash Heredoc
EOF

Note: if you are using Firefox (which does not honour pre-wrap, and
inserts sneaky invisible trailing whitespace in the code snippet)
please copy and paste the commands from here rather than directly
from the above code snippet.

 1. Assuming you don't already have a VPS with free capacity, and the
    patience to get Ghost configured alongside whatever else you have
    on it. (When I had space on an AWS T2 instance I needed for other
    reasons, I ran a Ghost blog on it using Dokku. It was not worth
    the hassle. However, Coolify looks like a promising self-hosted
    Heroku/Netlify alternative.) -

 2. I'm grandfathered in on the original 750 dyno-hour free tier,
    which is how I can keep this blog running on Heroku for free. -

 3. Via their Free Postgres databases for small projects blogpost (HN
    discussion) -

 4. Okay, okay, calling it a "single command" is maybe stretching it.
    -

 5. If you already have a Fly.io account, you can be done in about
    thirty seconds -- depending on region, current load, and your
    typing reflexes. -

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Written by Curiositry

Curiositry's Profile Image

An autodidact who enjoys building "web stuff", reading large books,
and hot-fixing his own software. Inquisitively pokes at a mechanical
typewriter in attempt to prove the Infinite Monkey Theorem.  Canada's
wet west coast  http://curiositry.com @curiositry

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