Day 137 - Failed to Install ghost blog on ec2 instance

Saturday, 9 March 2019 code life UserBit entrepreneurship

Step 1

Get mysql-server

sudo yum install mysql-server

Step 2

Get the ghost cli

sudo npm i -g ghost-cli

Step 3

Create a directory for your blog

sudo mkdir /var/www/my-blog

Step 4

Set the correct permissions for the blog

sudo chmod 775 /var/www/my-blog
sudo chown my-user:my-user /var/www/my-blog

Step 5

Install ghost

ghost install

however this failed

1) Checking system Node.js version

Message: The version of Node.js you are using is not supported.

let’s update our node version. I have nvm installed so should be relatively simple:

nvm install stable

let’s try again

ghost install

ugh, failed again… apaprently doesn’t support version 11. Let’s install a 10+ version

nvm install 10.13

try again now.

ghost install

ok didn’t work. so for ghost cli to work, they need access to systemd which isn’t available for Amazon Linux AMI. Since they don’t have access to systemd, they cannot set/run with the correct permissions and fail to start the blog.

I spent a good few hours then decided I’d rather just pay 30 bucks a month for ghost to manage it for me than try to deal with this nonsense. I signed up and the experience has been pretty solid so far.