Create a professional blog with AWS and Ghost

A professional blog is a great way to showcase your projects and expertise in a consolidated place.
There are a plethora of blog options to choose from including Medium, Blogger, Tumblr, Wordpress and more. When I created my blog, I decided to explore my options. I eventually landed on The Ghost Blogging Platform for several reasons, but mostly because it is open source and is maintained by rad types.

Hosting your own professional or personal blog with Ghost can be a bit more work than the likes of Blogger or Tumblr, but it is rewarding and gives you better control over your environment. After I decided to use Ghost as my blogging platform, I needed to find a way to host my blog. I chose to use a micro-instance provided by Amazon AWS.

By coincidence, by looking at the Amazon AWS Marketplace I found several prepackaged AMI's that were instances of AWS EC2 with Ghost pre-installed. After a bit of research, I decided to use the EC2 instance with Bitnami Ghost. In this guide, I'll show you how to:

Run an EC2 instance with Bitnami with Ghost preinstallation
Install a new theme for your Ghost blog
Set up a custom domain for your blog
Configure the AWS EC2 instance

First, you need to create an AWS account with Amazon if you do not already have one. Once completed, we need to do a bit of pre-work for the new host who will run the blog. We need to create a key pair for the EC2 instance so we can easily connect later in the tutorial. To do this, log in to the

AWS management console, click "EC2", which should be in the "Compute" section:
After clicking "EC2", navigate to the "Key pairs" section, which should be in the navigation column on the left side:

In the following screen, create a new key pair by clicking on the blue button that says "Create key pair". You can name it whatever you want. We called our "Block". The new key pair will appear in the list once it is created.

VIDEO 1.1 AWS TRAINING

Now that we have created a new key pair for our blog, we really need to create the host on which the Ghost blog will run. Navigate to the AWS Marketplace. In the search box, search for "Ghost." You will see a list of prebuilt EC2 instances to choose from. We want the one who is called "Ghost powered by Bitnami"

Click the blue selection button and on the next screen, click the "continue" button. In the resulting screen, we have the ability to customize our instance. There are only two settings we want to check on this screen. The first is the "Instance Type EC2". We want "t2.micro"

The next setting we want to check is the key pair that the instance is using. We want to set it for the key pair we created earlier; our key pair was named "Bloc"

Once they are set up correctly, click the "1-Click Launch" button. Now you have a free instance, working and soon running EC2 with Ghost pre-installed for a year. Check this by navigating to "Instances" in your AWS management console. You should see your new instance in the list of running instances

You can now browse your Ghost blog by finding the public IP address or public DNS of the above EC2 instance record and placing it in the URL locator bar in your browser. You should be greeted with the standard Bitnami Ghost HTML page.

Ghost Customizing
You want to remove the default publication that Bitnami provides and configure the settings in your new Ghost instance. Ghost makes this task trivial, allowing you to modify settings directly from your web interface. To do this, go to the Ghost administration page for your instance by typing your public IP address with "/ admin" attached
You will receive a login screen. You will need to enter the default Bitnami username and retrieve the password from the EC2 instance log files. The username is:
user@example.com
The password was generated automatically by the EC2 instance and we need to recover it from the Ghost log files. Go back to the EC2 management console, select your EC2 instance and go to Actions> Instance Settings> Get System Log

Find the line in the log that says Set the Bitnami application password for

You will need to copy and paste this password into the Ghost administrator login page to log on. After logging in with the automatically generated username and password, the first thing you want to do is set up the login email address with a new password that you can remember. You can do this by clicking the drop-down menu in the upper right corner of Ghost, which says "user@example.com."
From there, you can customize settings such as the title, description, logo, banner and much more of your blog.

To set up a custom DNS name for your new blog, you'll need to buy a domain name. You can use services like Namecheap to buy and set up your domains. After you decide on a domain provider, create your domain. You will need to set up a new DNS "A" record. In Namecheap, we do this by setting @ and www to point to our IP address. You also need to change the URL in the Ghost config.js file.

To change the URL, connect to your EC2 instance directly using SSH. You will need a copy of the key pair for your EC2 instance on your local machine. AWS provides instructions on how to do this on the AWS management page by selecting the EC2 instance you want from your list of EC2 instances and selecting "Connect." You can use Terminal in OS X to connect to your EC2 instance.

The Terminal is located in Applications> Utilities> Terminal. Copy and paste the above SSH command to connect to the EC2 instance. Once you have successfully connected to your EC2 instance, open the config.js file using an editor, such as VIM, on the command line: vim /opt/bitnami/apps/ghost/htdocs/config.jsfindo the "config" e In this section, find the "production" section. Here, you'll need to change the URL to the domain of your blog. Save the file and close it.

Now, restart Ghost by issuing the following command: sudo /opt/bitnami/ctlscript.sh restart ghostInstalling a New Theme for GhostInstalling a new Ghost theme is easy. Just copy the theme to the themes directory / opt / bitnami / apps / ghost / htdocs / content / themesRestart Ghost, then go to your admin panel in Ghost and select the theme: Select Save and your new theme should appear after an update .

If you have problems rendering, try restarting Ghost from the command line again. Hosting your own blogging platform is fun to tinker with, but taking a step forward and telling someone who created the software that hosts your blog is even more impressive. I am a curriculum developer for the block where I do lots of reading, writing, coding and finding out how to help our students. If you have found this guide helpful and want to learn how to be technically proficient, check out our Web Developer Track or our Full Stack Web Developer Program..
Configuring Custom DNS