Jon Purvis

I Finally Updated Ghost

Jon Purvis -

Well, I finally took the time to update the version of Ghost that this blog uses, mainly because I wanted to start using the Internal Linking tool that was added sometime last month, which makes it much easier to link to other posts. You simply type @ in your editor and then that opens up a list of your posts:

An example of the Internal Linking tool

I also wanted to use the latest editor for several reasons, the main one being that when I embed a Tweet, it renders without me having to change the URL from x.com to twitter.com, because the version of Ghost I was using was pre Twitter being called X but because Twitter embeds contain the x.com domain, Ghost wouldn't allow it so I'd have to always change the URL.

I'm a big fan of using Emoji in my posts and previously I'd use the native MacOS Emoji menu which meant having to press Control + Command + Space to bring up the menu, now I just need to type : followed by a name of an Emoji and it brings up a menu:

An example of the Ghost Emoji Menu

I also wanted to make use of the Ghost Bookmarker tool which is a Google Chrome extension that allows you to save a link directly in your Ghost admin. For example, if I'm stumbling around the web and come across a new package that I fancy sharing, I can use the tool to save a link to my Ghost Admin as a draft post, which I can then add to later on.

An example showing a bookmarked link within the Ghost Admin

Other additions that I can now benefit from include a more clean settings interface, post history and post reminders.

Getting a bit more technical, I was previously running Ghost 5.60, which released in August 2023. This site uses a self hosted version of Ghost via Digital Ocean, so it's up to me to keep it up to date. Turns out I hadn't done a great job 😄

It took more effort than I would've liked to get it updated as I ran into problems such as:

  • Node was out of date
  • The Ghost CLI was out of date
  • The directory for the Ghost Manager had the wrong permissions
  • Various things within node_modules had the wrong permission
  • The Ghost CLI was restarting Ghost but not recognising the restart had happened, so it kept spinning

Unfortunately I've always found the Ghost CLI a bit clunky. I don't think I've ever used it to update Ghost and had it work first time, which is a shame because the rest of the platform is perfect.

Note to self, don't leave it almost a year before updating ghost again! 👻