Ghost.org • Forum • Docs • Contributing • Twitter

 

Note

Love open source? We're hiring! Ghost is looking staff engineers to join the team and work with us full-time

 

The easiest way to get a production instance deployed is with our official Ghost(Pro) managed service. It takes about 2 minutes to launch a new site with worldwide CDN, backups, security and maintenance all done for you.

For most people this ends up being the best value option because of how much time it saves — and 100% of revenue goes to the Ghost Foundation; funding the maintenance and further development of the project itself. So you’ll be supporting open source software and getting a great service!

 

Quickstart install

If you want to run your own instance of Ghost, in most cases the best way is to use our CLI tool

npm install ghost-cli -g

 

Then, if installing locally add the local flag to get up and running in under a minute - Local install docs

ghost install local

 

or on a server run the full install, including automatic SSL setup using LetsEncrypt - Production install docs

ghost install

 

Check out our official documentation for more information about our recommended hosting stack & properly upgrading Ghost, plus everything you need to develop your own Ghost themes or work with our API.

Contributors & advanced developers

For anyone wishing to contribute to Ghost or to hack/customize core files we recommend following our full development setup guides: Contributor guide • Developer setup

Development from source

Requirements

• Node.js v22.13.1 or higher (use node --version to check)
• Docker (optional - SQLite works fine for development)
• Git for cloning the repository

Quick development setup

# 1. Clone and navigate to repository
git clone https://github.com/TryGhost/Ghost.git
cd Ghost

# 2. Install dependencies (ignore engine warnings)
yarn install --ignore-engines

# 3. Run automated setup (chooses SQLite by default)
yarn setup

# 4. Start development server
cd ghost/core
yarn dev

The setup script will:

• Offer SQLite (recommended) or MySQL via Docker
• Initialize the database with required tables
• Build the admin interface and all components
• Generate sample data for development

After setup, Ghost will be running at:

• Frontend: http://localhost:2368
• Admin: http://localhost:2368/ghost

Manual database options

Force SQLite (no Docker required):

yarn setup --sqlite

Use MySQL via Docker:

yarn setup  # Choose MySQL option when prompted

Node.js version management

If you have an older Node.js version, install v22+ using:

# Using Homebrew (macOS)
brew install node@22
export PATH="/usr/local/opt/node@22/bin:$PATH"

# Using nvm
nvm install 22
nvm use 22

 

Ghost sponsors

A big thanks to our sponsors and partners who make Ghost possible. If you're interested in sponsoring Ghost and supporting the project, please check out our profile on GitHub sponsors ❤️

DigitalOcean • Fastly • Tinybird

 

Getting help

Everyone can get help and support from a large community of developers over on the Ghost forum. Ghost(Pro) customers have access to 24/7 email support.

To stay up to date with all the latest news and product updates, make sure you subscribe to our changelog newsletter — or follow us on Twitter, if you prefer your updates bite-sized and facetious. 🎷🐢

 

Copyright & license

Copyright (c) 2013-2025 Ghost Foundation - Released under the MIT license. Ghost and the Ghost Logo are trademarks of Ghost Foundation Ltd. Please see our trademark policy for info on acceptable usage.