I recently decided to start a development blog. So I thought my first blog would be about how I set up my blog and what I learnt in doing so.

So I decided to compile a mini tutorial comprising of five parts, which go through the steps involved in starting up a Ghost blog on OpenShift using my experiences. The topics covered so far are:

1. Starting a New Blog With Ghost and Openshift (This Post)
2. Git Clone Your OpenShift Ghost Blog
3. Update Your Ghost Blog
4. Use a Custom Domain for Your Ghost Blog
5. Free SSL For Your Ghost Blog (Coming soon)

Outcome of This Tutorial Have a free Ghost blog hosted on OpenShift.

Blogging Platform Choice

For my blogging platform I wanted something that was clean, simple and easy to set up. I looked around for a little bit and settled on Ghost.

Blogging Platform Choice

After deciding on a platform the next step was to figure out where to host it so that I could get everything setup and ready to go. I originally decided to use Azure to host my blog as you can have 10 free websites, can scale the site as the need arises and I had used it before. However after starting with Azure I soon found out that you cannot have a custom domain for a free site. After some looking around I came upon OpenShift so I thought I would give that a go.

Let’s Get On With Deployment

After creating a new OpenShift account you need to create your new application. I followed the instructions from OpenShift’s Ghost quickstart guide, it included a few steps:

• Create a new application with this link Quick deploy
• Setup up rhc tools (there is quite a bit to setting up this)
• run rhc set-env NODE_ENV=production --app $appname
• run rhc app restart $appname

Where $appname is the name of your Ghost application.

Congratulations Congratulations you have now setup your new blog site.