Upgrading Ghost on Webfaction

A while back I started a blog using Ghost to try it out. Webfaction made it easy by having a 1 click installer for it almost immediately after it was available. The site has been up and running for a while and I noticed that there have been several upgrades since I installed it so I wanted to upgrade to the latest version. Here is how I did that. Note that these instructions will only work if you installed Ghost using the Webfaction installer.

##Back up your data

Log into your ghost blog and then go to /ghost/debug/ and press the export button to download a JSON file containing all of your data. That was easy! Then backup the files in /content/themes and /content/images

##Upgrade

Now login via SSH and go to the directory where ghost is installed

cd ~/webapps/appname/ghost

Upload the ghost zip file via SFTP or download using WGET Unzip ghost

unzip -uo ghost-0.5.3.zip

Tell npm to upgrade the packages for ghost

../bin/npm install --production

I got some errors and warnings but everything worked ok for me after the next step.

Then it’s just a matter of restarting ghost for the changes to take effect.

../bin/stop && ../bin/start

That’s it. You should now be running the latest version of Ghost.