Oct 26, 2019 1 min read

Beginner's Guide to Updating Your Ghost Blog

Beginner's Guide to Updating Your Ghost Blog
Table of Contents

A step-by-step guide to upgrading the Ghost publishing platform to the latest version. Also includes references on how to back up your Ghost content.

The Ghost 3.0 publishing platform is out now and it brings some major changes and new features, including the ability to offer subscriptions and membership. In this guide, we'll go through how to update Ghost to the latest version.

Perform a Full Backup of Your Ghost Content

Updates can always go badly. Before updating, you should first back up your Ghost content, discussed recently in another post here.

You should be backing up your content anyway, but if you aren't regularly backing up your content, be sure to at least do it this time. Seriously, don't skip this.

Perform the Ghost Upgrade

1. In general, it's always a good idea to begin with updating your packages:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get dist-upgrade

2. Update npm:

sudo npm install -g npm

3. Update Ghost-cli:

sudo npm install -g ghost-cli@latest

4. Change directory to where you have Ghost installed (this is typically /var/www/ghost/):

cd /var/www/ghost

Note that if you don't do this, you'll be greeted with the error message: "Working directory is not a recognisable Ghost installation".

5. Update Ghost:

ghost update

Note that you don't use sudo here. You just want to run it as the user associated with your original Ghost install.

After that, Ghost will run some checks, including checking your theme's compatibility with the update, and will then proceed with the install. In a future post, I'll give a tutorial on how to manually edit a Ghost theme.

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