Setup Ghost Blog part I (mail & theme)

In a previous post, we bring up Ghost droplet. Now we are going over some configuration tasks. Most configuration is done by editing config.js.

Mail setup

You need to setup Ghost to send mail. For now, Ghost sends mail if you forgot password but in future their team planning additional features that will be sending mail.

Prerequisite to be able to send mail is to have some account with email sending service. My recommendation is to use Mailgun but you can use Gmail also.

Mailgun

Mailgun is transactional email service that is very easy to use. With a free account, there is a quota of 10000 emails a month. When you create an account with Mailgun you will need username and password for email service that Mailgun creates for you, not that use to log in.

You can use sandbox domain that Mailgun provides or if you have already domain setup with mailgun you can use that.Log into your Mailgun account and go to Domains tab to get user and password for the domain you will be using. With that info open config.js of your Ghost blog and find next section:

mail: {    
trasnport: 'SMTP',
    options: {
      service: 'Mailgun',
      auth: {
         user: 'your-mailgun-user-for-domain',
         pass:'your-mailgun-pass-for-domain'
      }
    }
},

You should have 2 section like this one for production mode and one for development mode. If you installed Ghost using Digital Ocean Ghost droplet than Ghost is already running in production mode. If not and you are not certain in which mode your installation is running then you can change in both sections.

Gmail

Other options for mail configuration is Gmail. If you use Gmail for sending mail it is better to use a separate account for that purpose only. Configuration in config.js is:

mail: {
  transport: 'SMTP',
  options: {
      auth: {
          user: 'youremail@gmail.com',
          pass: 'yourpassword'
      }
  }
}

Theme setup

Installing new themes is fairly easy for most themes. You login into your host server and ensure that you have git installed on the system.If not, install it using command

apt-get update && apt-get install git-core -y 

Go to location of ghost installation(In case of digital ocean droplet /var/www/ghost/) and enter theme folder content/themes and use git to install theme.

git clone https://github.com/<path to theme repo>.git

After theme has installed change ownership of the files to the Ghost user and group:

chown -R ghost:ghost <theme folder name>

Then you restart ghost instance:

service ghost restart

Now you should be able to change themes from admin panel of Ghost instance. Go to /ghost/settings/general and on the bottom, you will see a "Theme" area. Change the theme to the one you installed.

In next post, I go over domain and one comment system setup