This blog runs on Ghost. So far I’m really loving it. It’s a blogging platform, pure and simple. Everything you need. Nothing you don’t. Ghost is built on Node.js.
I develop and write on a Windows machine. A Surface Pro 4 to be exact. Windows runs Node.js applications pretty well on it’s own. But with the release of Bash on Ubuntu on Windows, I also have the ability to run Node.js from Linux (erm, on Windows).
Why would I do this? I’ve seen a lot of chatter lately about how cool Bash on Windows is. I have little experience with Linux. Being a primarily .Net developer. So I wanted to dip my toes in the water. Setting up my local copy of my Ghost blog seems like a good place to start.
The first thing I did was to install Bash on Ubuntu on Windows. The installation instructions can be found in the installation guide.
Next I needed to install Node.js. I did some Google searching and landed on a great article by David Gilbertson called Running Node.js on Linux on Windows (with no VM).
In short I had to run the following command in my new Bash prompt:
curl -sL https://deb.nodesource.com/setup_7.x | sudo -E bash -
sudo apt-get install -y nodejs
That’s all there is to it! So now we have Node.js installed. A quick node -v in Bash confirms it’s installed correctly.
Now that Node.js is installed the next thing I wanted to do is see if I could start running Ghost. I pointed my shiny new Bash shell to the directory where my Ghost install lives and keyed in my usual command: `npm start’.
Unfortunately, this did not work.
The problem here is that I have the wrong version of Node.js. Thankfully there is a cool command line utility that can help solve the problem: Node Version Manager. Or nvm for short.
Ghost has a handy list of Supported Node Versions. So we can consult this list and use nvm to tell our new Linux on Windows environment which version we want to use. At the time of writing the latest version of Node.js supported by Ghost is 6.9. I can install and configure this version of Node.js using one simple command
nvm install 6.9
From there I did an npm install on the same directory as my Ghost installation. I wasn’t sure if this was a needed step. I had installed using Windows before, but did not know if the packages were in the same place for the new Linux environment. I may do some more research here, but there is no harm in running the command again.
Afterwards I was met with another error. Fortunately like any good error message it provided steps to solve. One more command typed into bash npm install sqlite3 --save and the error was solved.
After all this I was able to use my usual command of npm start to fire up my local version of Ghost. I learned a bit about how to use Bash on Ubuntu on Windows. There are a couple of other tasks I may try out including getting git working. I’m stoked to put another tool in the toolbox.
Joe