CoolGhost

Fully self-hosted Ghost 6 with self-hosted analytics, packaged as a single Docker Compose stack for Coolify (or plain Docker Compose).

Why

Ghost 6 ships a great analytics dashboard (Top content, Sources, Locations, visitor KPIs), but it expects Tinybird — a cloud-hosted ClickHouse service — for storage and queries. The official TryGhost/ghost-docker setup still relies on that third‑party cloud dependency, which is awkward to wire up in Coolify and means the instance isn't truly self-hosted.

CoolGhost removes the cloud dependency by running ClickHouse locally and mapping the Tinybird ingest/query API that Ghost expects onto that local instance — so analytics work end to end with nothing leaving your server.

Architecture

Browser ──▶ Caddy :3000 ──┬─▶ Ghost  :2368        (CMS + Admin)
                          ├─▶ traffic-analytics    (/.ghost/analytics/*  — official ingest)
                          └─▶ traffic-stats        (/.ghost/stats/*      — Tinybird-compatible query API)
                                   │
                                   ▼
                              ClickHouse :8123  ◀── MySQL :3306 (Ghost content)

Service	Role
caddy	Reverse proxy / single public entrypoint on port 3000.
ghost	Ghost 6 CMS and Admin.
mysql	Ghost's primary database.
clickhouse	Self-hosted analytics store (replaces Tinybird Cloud).
traffic-analytics	Official Ghost ingest service; forwards page hits to traffic-stats.
traffic-stats	Custom Fastify service that speaks Ghost's Tinybird API and queries ClickHouse. See traffic-stats/README.md.

Quick deployment (Coolify)

1. Create a Mailgun account (or have your SMTP credentials ready) — Ghost needs email for staff invites, password resets, and member magic links.

2. In the Coolify UI, add a new resource → Docker Compose and point it at this repository (https://github.com/kaperkunde/CoolGhost.git) — see Coolify's Docker Compose docs.

3. Set the environment variables (Coolify → your resource → Environment Variables):

   Variable	Required	Description
   SERVICE_URL_CADDY	✅	Public URL of your Ghost site, e.g. https://blog.example.com.
   SERVICE_HOST_CADDY	✅	Bare hostname of the URL above, e.g. blog.example.com (see Analytics notes).
   SERVICE_USER_MYSQL	✅	MySQL user for Ghost.
   SERVICE_PASSWORD_MYSQL	✅	MySQL password for Ghost.
   SERVICE_PASSWORD_MYSQLROOT	✅	MySQL root password.
   MAIL_FROM	✅	Default from address, e.g. Ghost <noreply@blog.example.com>.
   MAIL_OPTIONS_AUTH_USER	✅	Mailgun SMTP username.
   MAIL_OPTIONS_AUTH_PASS	✅	Mailgun SMTP password.
   MAIL_OPTIONS_HOST	✅	SMTP host, e.g. smtp.eu.mailgun.org.
   MAIL_OPTIONS_PORT		SMTP port (default 465).
   MAIL_OPTIONS_SECURE		Use TLS (default true).
   MAIL_OPTIONS_SERVICE		Mail service name (default Mailgun).
   GHOST_DATABASE		Database name (default ghost).
   CADDY_LOG_OUTPUT		Caddy access log target (default discard).

4. Launch — and you're good to go. Open SERVICE_URL_CADDY and finish setup at /ghost.

Local deployment

git clone https://github.com/kaperkunde/CoolGhost.git
cd CoolGhost
cp .env.example .env          # defaults already target http://localhost:3000
docker compose -f docker-compose.yaml -f docker-compose.local.yaml up -d

Then open http://localhost:3000 for the site and http://localhost:3000/ghost for Admin (and analytics). The docker-compose.local.yaml override publishes Caddy on host port 3000 and runs Ghost in development mode (see below).

Analytics notes

Ghost makes analytics requests two ways, and both must reach traffic-stats through Caddy:

• Browser-side (Sources, Locations) hit the public URL directly — no special handling needed.
• Server-side (Top content) go through Ghost's SSRF-protected HTTP client, which rejects single-label hostnames (like caddy) and private Docker IPs. The only production-safe bypass is making the request host string-match the site URL host.

That's why:

• In production, tinybird__stats__endpoint points at the public URL and SERVICE_HOST_CADDY is added as a Caddy network alias, so the public hostname resolves to Caddy inside the Docker network.
• Locally, localhost can't be routed to Caddy from inside the container, so the override runs Ghost with NODE_ENV=development (which skips the SSRF checks) and points the server-side endpoint straight at http://caddy:3000.

The ClickHouse schema (events table + materialized view) is created automatically on first boot from clickhouse/init/01_schema.sql.

License

MIT