Wraith

A simple utility Bash script to backup Ghost publishing platform.

💡 Tip: run make help to display help message.

Check out the Makefile

Context

Getting started with Ghost is easy. You would pick between:

• Managed service
• Self-hosted on a VPS or serverless platform like Railway

Using managed version will most likely save you a bunch of headaches (and time) that come along with self-hosting any other sites:

• Backups
• Maintenance
• Downtime recovery
• Security, etc.

In short, you’d sleep easy at night while they stay awake.

Having that said, if you want to take on the challenge of self-hosting your own Ghost site, here's a tiny script to help with your backups.

Read more...

Table of Contents

• Wraith
  • Context
  • Table of Contents
  • Flowchart
  • Requirements
  • Set up Rclone
  • How to use
  • Set up a Cron job
  • Testing and restoring backup
  • FAQ
  • Contributing

Flowchart

graph LR
  1(["start"]) --> 2["run checks"] --> 3["tar content/"] --> 4["run mysqldump"] --> 5["rclone zip files to cloud storage"] --> 6["clean up"] --> 7(["end"])

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Requirements

💡 Tip: run make check to check if all requirements are installed.

A list of CLI needed to be installed:

• ghost
• mysql
• rclone
• gzip
• tar

Set up Rclone

💡 Tip: run make setup.

Note Install rclone using curl -s https://rclone.org/install.sh | bash

An example to configure Rclone with Google Drive (reference):

1. Run rclone config
2. Name your remote remote
3. Follow rlcone.org/drive
4. If you're working on a remote machine without a browser (e.g. Digital Ocean Droplet via SSH), say N for the auto config prompt. Follow through the instructions
5. Run rclone lsd remote:/ to check your connection

How to use

Note Switch to the ghost-mgr user to manage Ghost using sudo -i -u ghost-mgr

1. SSH into your VPS where you host your Ghost site
2. Set up Rclone
3. Clone this repository
4. Run ./backup.sh from the repository directory

Set up a Cron job

Reference: crontab.guru

1. Add a crontab -e item
2. For this example, we will back up the data every week: 0 0 * * 0 cd /$HOME/wraith/ && ./backup.sh

Testing and restoring backup

Backups are not backups unless you have tested restoring from them.

Let's test our backup locally using Docker.

1. At a new directory, copy your ghost_content_YYYY_MM_DD_HHMM.tar.gz backup file there. Decompress the backup files using tar -xvf
2. Run Ghost locally using docker run -d --name some-ghost -e url=http://localhost:3001 -p 3001:2368 -v /path/to/images:/var/lib/ghost/content/images ghost to restore the blog images
3. Visit localhost:3001/ghost to create an admin account
4. From the Ghost Admin interface (localhost:3001/ghost/#/settings/labs), import your JSON Ghost blog content from decompressed data/
5. You can import your members CSV from the Members page too

Tip: run bash within your Ghost Docker container using docker exec -it some-ghost bash

FAQ

See FAQ.md.

Contributing

See CONTRIBUTING.md.