Setting up Ghost on Docker using Synology Ds918+ internal network.

While setting up a blog can be relatively easy in today's overload of social applications i wanted to go that little further by setting up a Ghost blog on a local instance using my Synology DS918+.

First off i needed to install the Docker application that is available on Synology application store, then you can search the docker image repository for "Ghost Blog". Once you have selected and installed the image you can start the Docker instance, this does come with a few teething problems that quickly became apparent.

All Pages to localhost

All pages and links within ghost will point to localhost, this wouldnt be a problem if you had a docker instance installed on your laptop. As you can probably guess localhost means isolated to your own "local" device, trying to access from another machine on your network will not work ( localhost resolves to 127.0.0.1 also known as a loopback ).  

The simple way to fix would be to manually change the page URL's under the Ghost settings from "http://localhost:32777/About" to the IP of the DS918+.. "http://192.168.1.??:12345/About" This should solve the routing issue for those pages.. however you will need to perform one last amendment to tell your Ghost Docker instance it's correct URL.  The simple change is done under the Docker environment variables

Variable = url
Value = http://192.168.1.??/

When you add these variables please make sure that "url" is written in lowercase, for some unknown reason having "URL" will not work ( I just saved you about an hour of time ).

Great! now what?

Your Ghost Blog should now be running within your home network, you can access the Ghost admin panel by going to "http://youripadddress/ghost" There you should be presented with the first setup prompt.  

Remember this setup is only for access on your internal network, i have kept this setup as i do not want to open my network to the outside world. Once i have completed any tests on templates or colours or even upgrades on my internal network i can offload them onto my live Ghost blog.

For external access i will be using DigitalOcean to create a droplet on their cloud instance, this is a pre made image that can be setup in minutes ! The benefits of using DigitalOcean are extensive, the main benefit for me is network security as they will handle all traffic and patching to their servers for a stress free blogging experience.