Ghost

Ghost is a free, open, simple blogging platform that's available to anyone who wants to use it. Lovingly created and maintained by John O'Nolan + Hannah Wolfe + an amazing group of contributors.

Visit the project's website at http://tryghost.org!

Getting Started

Installing from a VIP Release

Please Note: VIP Releases are pre-built packages, GitHub releases (tags) are not. To install from a GitHub release you need to follow instructions 2-5 from the Working on Ghost Core section.

1. Once you've downloaded one of the release packages, unzip it, and place the directory wherever you would like to run the code
2. Fire up a terminal (or node command prompt in Windows) and change directory to the root of the Ghost application (where config.js and index.js are)
3. run npm install to install the node dependencies (if you get errors to do with SQLite, please see the compatibility notes)
4. To start ghost, run npm start
5. Visit http://localhost:2368/ in your web browser

Logging in For The First Time

Once you have the Ghost server up and running, you should be able to navigate to http://localhost:2368/ghost from a web browser, where you will be prompted for a login.

1. Click on the "register new user" link
2. Enter your user details (careful here: There is no password reset yet!)
3. Return to the login screen and use those details to log in.

Note - this is still very alpha. Not everything works yet.

Currently Working Features

• Login / Logout / Register
  • User can register an email address & password
    • User can login
    • User can logout
    • All /ghost/ routes (the admin) are auth-protected
• Dashboard
  • All widgets are static at the moment. Blogging related functionality is our first priority.
• Admin menu
  • G, dashboard, content, new post & settings menu items go to correct pages
• Content screen
  • Lists all posts
  • Select post in list highlights that post and opens it in the preview pane
• Write screen
  • Live preview works for all standard markdown
  • Save draft button saves entered title & content. Everything is published by default.
  • Editing/opening existing post puts correct info in title and content panels & save updates content.
• Database
  • The database is created and populated with basic data on first run of the server
  • New posts and edits save and last forever
  • The data can be reset by finding core/shared/data/*.db and emptying or deleting the file. The next restart of the server will cause the database to be recreated and repopulated.
• Frontend
  • Homepage lists a number of posts as configured in config.js
  • Clicking on an individual post loads an individual post page
  • Date formatting helper uses moment

Working on Ghost Core

Note: It is recommended that you use the Ghost-Vagrant setup for developing Ghost.

Pre-requisites:

• node 0.10 or 0.11
• ruby and the gems 'sass' and 'bourbon'
• if you want to build the docs, python and pygments

1. Clone the git repo
2. cd into the project folder
3. Run git submodule update --init
4. Run npm install -g grunt-cli
5. Run npm install.
   • If the install fails with errors to do with "node-gyp rebuild", follow the SQLite3 install instructions
   • Usually if you're within vagrant, and have installed the guest plugins and updated that, this will not happen
6. run grunt init from the root - this installs bourbon, compiles sass and compiles handlebars templates

Frontend can be located at localhost:2368, Admin is at localhost:2368/ghost

Whist developing you may wish to use grunt watch to watch for changes to handlebars and sass and recompile automatically

Updating with the latest changes

Pulling down the latest changes from master will often require more than just a pull, you may also need to do one or more of the following:

• npm install - fetch any new dependencies
• git submodule update - fetch the latest changes to Casper (the default theme)
• grunt - will recompile handlebars templates and sass for the admin (as long as you have previously run grunt init to install bourbon)
• delete core/server/data/*.db - delete the database and allow Ghost to recreate the fixtures

SQLite3 Install Instructions

Ghost depends upon SQLite3, which has to be built for each OS. NPM is as smart as it can be about this, and as long as your machine has all the pre-requisites for compiling/building a C++ program, the npm install still works.

For Mac users: The easiest way to do this is to download/install XCode from the App Store (free). This will automatically install all the tools you need - you don't need to open the app.

For Everyone else: if you don't have the required pre-requisites, you will need to either get them, or as a shortcut, obtain a precompiled SQLite3 package for your OS. We have created some of these here.

The pre-compiled package should be downloaded, extracted and placed in the node_modules folder, such that it lives in node_modules/sqlite3, if you have a partial install of the SQLite3 package, replace it with the files you downloaded from github. Be sure that all the SQLite3 files and folders live directly in node_modules/sqlite3 - there should note be a node_modules/sqlite3/sqlite3 folder.

Versioning

For transparency and insight into our release cycle, and for striving to maintain backward compatibility, Ghost will be maintained according to the Semantic Versioning guidelines as much as possible.

Releases will be numbered with the following format:

<major>.<minor>.<patch>-<build>

Constructed with the following guidelines:

• A new major release indicates a large change where backwards compatibility is broken.
• A new minor release indicates a normal change that maintains backwards compatibility.
• A new patch release indicates a bugfix or small change which does not affect compatibility.
• A new build release indicates this is a pre-release of the version.

Bugs

If you have a bug or feature request, please open a new issue. Before opening any issue, please search for existing issues and read the Issue Guidelines, written by Nicolas Gallagher.

Contributions

Please see our Guide to Contributing.

Community

Keep track of Ghost development and Ghost community activity.

• Follow Ghost on Twitter, Facebook and Google+.
• Read and subscribe to the The Official Ghost Blog.
• Chat with Ghost developers on IRC. We're on irc.freenode.net, in the #Ghost channel.

Compiling CSS & JavaScript

A SASS compiler is required to work with the CSS in this project.

With bourbon, all you have to do is run grunt init from the root of Ghost, which will compile the admin section. For everything else, use sass <sourcefile> <targetfile>.

We also recommend CodeKit (Paid/Mac) & Scout (Free/Mac/PC).

Copyright & License

Copyright (C) 2013 The Ghost Foundation - Released under the MIT Lincense.

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.