Ghost is a great tool to create a professional blog. You can easily turn your blog into a sustainable business thanks to its built-in membership feature. So far, the easiest way to create a blog with Ghost is by subscribing to a managed service from Ghost.org, which is a paid service. If you want to try the experience of blogging with Ghost for free, you can install Ghost on your local machine. Ghost CMS can be installed locally on Windows, Mac, and Linux. In this post, we will show you how to install Ghost on Mac.
In addition to trying Ghost, installing Ghost locally is also a great option if you want to develop Ghost themes.
Ghost is a headless CMS written in JavaScript running on Node.js. Therefore, to be able to install Ghost, you need to have Node.js installed on your Mac machine. Here are the steps to install Ghost on Mac.
Step 1: Install Node.js
To install Node.js on Mac, first, download the installer file on its official website. There are two Node.js versions you can choose from. We recommend the LTS version as it is more stable.
Once the installer file is downloaded (available in a PKG format), double-click to start installing. On the appearing dialog window, click the Continue button.
Accept the license agreement and click the Continue button. Next, click the Install button.
You will be asked to enter your password. Simply enter and wait until the installation process is done. Once everything goes well, you can continue to next step below.
Step 2: Install Ghost-CLI
The installation process you have just done above included NPM, a JavaScript package manager for Node.js. You need to install Ghost-CLI, a tool to install Ghost CMS.
To install Ghost-CLI, open Terminal and type the following command:
sudo npm install ghost-cli@latest -g
Step 3: Install Ghost CMS
Before installing the Ghost CMS, first, create a new folder and name it ghost. You can create the folder whether using command line on Terminal or via Finder. If you prefer using command line, you can type mkdir ghos on Terminal.
Once the folder is created, enter to it using the cd command (cd ghost). Lastly, install Ghost by typing the following command on Terminal:
ghost install local
Wait until the installation process is done. Once done, you can validate the installation by checking the Ghost version by typing ghost version on Terminal.
To start running Ghost, you can type ghost start on Terminal. While to stop it, you can type ghost stop. Make sure to run these commands from the folder where Ghost is installed.
To access the Ghost CMS, you can type http://localhost:2368 on your web browser address bar. To access the dashboard, type http://localhost:2368/ghost. You will be asked to create an account before being able to login to the dashboard. Simply create one and you can start trying Ghost.