Updating Ghost to 0.10.1 from 0.6.4, Node 0.12 to 4.5 LTS & NPM

The development of Ghost has been moving pretty fast. My version of Ghost was way out of date and the version of Node I was running wasn't even LTS. My blog was pretty much just left in the dust...

This year has been full of life changing events and I haven't been able to find the time to sit down and give this blog as much love as I'd like. Anyways, now is the time to make time. So, my first order of business was to get this baby up to date!

Before I attempted to do anything, I read through Ghost's release logs for any major changes to it's prerequisites or dependencies. As of Ghost v0.9.0, they recommend Node v4 for running Ghost... I was running 0.12.

Updating Ghost

The good folks at Ghost put together a nice upgrade guide that documents the procedure pretty thoroughly. It might also be good idea to bookmark that link as they do keep it fairly up-to-date with each release.

## My TL;DR modified from their guide

## Example path for Ghost's install
# /var/www/ghost

cd /var/www/

## Download the latest version of Ghost:
curl -LOk https://ghost.org/zip/ghost-latest.zip

## Unzip to a temp directory (/var/www/ghost-temp):
unzip ghost-latest.zip -d ghost-temp

## Change directory into your current ghost install:
cd ghost  # /var/www/ghost

## Remove the core directoy:
rm -rf core

## Change back to your ghost download (ghost-temp)
cd /var/www/ghost-temp/

## Copy the new core directory to your Ghost install:
cp -R core /var/www/ghost

## Copy the other key files to your Ghost install directory:
cp index.js *.json /var/www/ghost

## (optional) Update Casper by copying the casper folder:
cp -R content/themes/casper /var/www/ghost/content/themes

## Change back to your ghost install directory:
cd /var/www/ghost

## (optional) Update permissions:
chown -R ghost:ghost *


## Do not update dependencies yet!
## It will fail because Node & NPM have not yet been updated

##Update Node from 0.12 to 4.5 LTS Updating Node wasn't difficult. NPM has a neat package called "n" which allows you to interactively manage your Node versions with a few terminal commands.

## Clear npm's cache
sudo npm cache clean -f

## Install n globally
sudo npm install -g n

## Let n know what version of Node you want running.
## In our case, we want LTS (4.5.0)
n lts

## Be sure to checkout n's docs for more info on usage:
## https://www.npmjs.com/package/n

## Verify that our Node version is correct
node -v
## v4.5.0

Finally, Update NPM & Ghost's Dependencies

Initially, after updating Node, I tried running npm install --production and got a strange error.

npm WARN cannot run in wd ghost@0.10.1 node core/server/utils/npm/preinstall.js (wd=/var/www/ghost)

Updating NPM did the trick!

## Update NPM with... NPM!
npm install npm -g

## Update Ghost's deps
npm install --production

Overcoming My Last Set of Issues

NPM KILL

While npm install did start to run, it would eventually stop before it fully completed and scream NPM KILL! at me...

So... why the heck is it timing out and killing the install task? Well, before I started I created a "Cloned Droplet" in DigitalOcean with a potato instance (512GB/1CPU) for my staging server to test off of. As it turns out, this was my issue. NPM install was overloading my micro instance. After I increased its resources to 2GB/2CPU it went off without a hitch.

502 Bad Gateway after Ghost restart

Trying to start ghost with npm start --production resulted in a 502 error. Somewhere my permissions got crossed but I was able to fix it by running:

chown -R ghost:ghost ghost/*

All systems go!