bitnami-containers/bitnami/ghost

Bitnami Secure Image for Ghost

What is Ghost?

Ghost is an open source publishing platform designed to create blogs, magazines, and news sites. It includes a simple markdown editor with preview, theming, and SEO built-in to simplify editing.

Overview of Ghost Trademarks: This software listing is packaged by Bitnami. The respective trademarks mentioned in the offering are owned by the respective companies, and use of them does not imply any affiliation or endorsement.

TL;DR

docker run --name ghost bitnami/ghost:latest

Warning: This quick setup is only intended for development environments. You are encouraged to change the insecure default credentials and check out the available configuration options in the Environment Variables section for a more secure d eployment.

⚠️ Important Notice: Upcoming changes to the Bitnami Catalog

Beginning August 28th, 2025, Bitnami will evolve its public catalog to offer a curated set of hardened, security-focused images under the new Bitnami Secure Images initiative. As part of this transition:

• Granting community users access for the first time to security-optimized versions of popular container images.
• Bitnami will begin deprecating support for non-hardened, Debian-based software images in its free tier and will gradually remove non-latest tags from the public catalog. As a result, community users will have access to a reduced number of hardened images. These images are published only under the “latest” tag and are intended for development purposes
• Starting August 28th, over two weeks, all existing container images, including older or versioned tags (e.g., 2.50.0, 10.6), will be migrated from the public catalog (docker.io/bitnami) to the “Bitnami Legacy” repository (docker.io/bitnamilegacy), where they will no longer receive updates.
• For production workloads and long-term support, users are encouraged to adopt Bitnami Secure Images, which include hardened containers, smaller attack surfaces, CVE transparency (via VEX/KEV), SBOMs, and enterprise support.

These changes aim to improve the security posture of all Bitnami users by promoting best practices for software supply chain integrity and up-to-date deployments. For more details, visit the Bitnami Secure Images announcement.

Why use Bitnami Secure Images?

• Bitnami Secure Images and Helm charts are built to make open source more secure and enterprise ready.
• Triage security vulnerabilities faster, with transparency into CVE risks using industry standard Vulnerability Exploitability Exchange (VEX), KEV, and EPSS scores.
• Our hardened images use a minimal OS (Photon Linux), which reduces the attack surface while maintaining extensibility through the use of an industry standard package format.
• Stay more secure and compliant with continuously built images updated within hours of upstream patches.
• Bitnami containers, virtual machines and cloud images use the same components and configuration approach - making it easy to switch between formats based on your project needs.
• Hardened images come with attestation signatures (Notation), SBOMs, virus scan reports and other metadata produced in an SLSA-3 compliant software factory.

Only a subset of BSI applications are available for free. Looking to access the entire catalog of applications as well as enterprise support? Try the commercial edition of Bitnami Secure Images today.

How to deploy Ghost in Kubernetes?

Deploying Bitnami applications as Helm Charts is the easiest way to get started with our applications on Kubernetes. Read more about the installation in the Bitnami Ghost Chart GitHub repository.

Why use a non-root container?

Non-root container images add an extra layer of security and are generally recommended for production environments. However, because they run as a non-root user, privileged tasks are typically off-limits. Learn more about non-root containers in our docs.

Supported tags and respective Dockerfile links

Learn more about the Bitnami tagging policy and the difference between rolling tags and immutable tags in our documentation page.

You can see the equivalence between the different tags by taking a look at the tags-info.yaml file present in the branch folder, i.e bitnami/ASSET/BRANCH/DISTRO/tags-info.yaml.

Subscribe to project updates by watching the bitnami/containers GitHub repo.

Get this image

The recommended way to get the Bitnami Ghost Docker Image is to pull the prebuilt image from the Docker Hub Registry.

docker pull bitnami/ghost:latest

To use a specific version, you can pull a versioned tag. You can view the list of available versions in the Docker Hub Registry.

docker pull bitnami/ghost:[TAG]

If you wish, you can also build the image yourself by cloning the repository, changing to the directory containing the Dockerfile and executing the docker build command. Remember to replace the APP, VERSION and OPERATING-SYSTEM path placeholders in the example command below with the correct values.

git clone https://github.com/bitnami/containers.git
cd bitnami/APP/VERSION/OPERATING-SYSTEM
docker build -t bitnami/APP:latest .

How to use this image

Ghost requires access to a MySQL or MariaDB database to store information. We'll use the Bitnami Docker Image for MySQL for the database requirements.

Using the Docker Command Line

Step 1: Create a network

docker network create ghost-network

Step 2: Create a volume for MySQL persistence and create a MySQL container

$ docker volume create --name mysql_data
docker run -d --name mysql \
  --env ALLOW_EMPTY_PASSWORD=yes \
  --env MYSQL_USER=bn_ghost \
  --env MYSQL_PASSWORD=bitnami \
  --env MYSQL_DATABASE=bitnami_ghost \
  --network ghost-network \
  --volume mysql_data:/bitnami/mysql \
  bitnami/mysql:latest

Step 3: Create volumes for Ghost persistence and launch the container

$ docker volume create --name ghost_data
docker run -d --name ghost \
  -p 8080:8080 -p 8443:8443 \
  --env ALLOW_EMPTY_PASSWORD=yes \
  --env GHOST_DATABASE_USER=bn_ghost \
  --env GHOST_DATABASE_PASSWORD=bitnami \
  --env GHOST_DATABASE_NAME=bitnami_ghost \
  --network ghost-network \
  --volume ghost_data:/bitnami/ghost \
  bitnami/ghost:latest

Access your application at http://your-ip/

Run the application using Docker Compose

curl -sSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/bitnami/containers/main/bitnami/ghost/docker-compose.yml > docker-compose.yml
docker-compose up -d

Please be aware this file has not undergone internal testing. Consequently, we advise its use exclusively for development or testing purposes. For production-ready deployments, we highly recommend utilizing its associated Bitnami Helm chart.

If you detect any issue in the docker-compose.yaml file, feel free to report it or contribute with a fix by following our Contributing Guidelines.

Persisting your application

If you remove the container all your data will be lost, and the next time you run the image the database will be reinitialized. To avoid this loss of data, you should mount a volume that will persist even after the container is removed.

For persistence you should mount a directory at the /bitnami/ghost path. If the mounted directory is empty, it will be initialized on the first run. Additionally you should mount a volume for persistence of the MySQL data.

The above examples define the Docker volumes named mysql_data and ghost_data. The Ghost application state will persist as long as volumes are not removed.

To avoid inadvertent removal of volumes, you can mount host directories as data volumes. Alternatively you can make use of volume plugins to host the volume data.

Mount host directories as data volumes with Docker Compose

This requires a minor change to the docker-compose.yml file present in this repository:

   mysql:
     ...
     volumes:
-      - mysql_data:/bitnami/mysql
+      - /path/to/mysql-persistence:/bitnami/mysql
   ...
   ghost:
     ...
     volumes:
-      - ghost_data:/bitnami/ghost
+      - /path/to/ghost-persistence:/bitnami/ghost
   ...
-volumes:
-  mysql_data:
-    driver: local
-  ghost_data:
-    driver: local

NOTE: As this is a non-root container, the mounted files and directories must have the proper permissions for the UID 1001.

Mount host directories as data volumes using the Docker command line

Step 1: Create a network (if it does not exist)

docker network create ghost-network

Step 2. Create a MySQL container with host volume

docker run -d --name mysql \
  --env ALLOW_EMPTY_PASSWORD=yes \
  --env MYSQL_USER=bn_ghost \
  --env MYSQL_PASSWORD=bitnami \
  --env MYSQL_DATABASE=bitnami_ghost \
  --network ghost-network \
  --volume /path/to/mysql-persistence:/bitnami/mysql \
  bitnami/mysql:latest

Step 3. Create the Ghost container with host volumes

docker run -d --name ghost \
  -p 8080:8080 -p 8443:8443 \
  --env ALLOW_EMPTY_PASSWORD=yes \
  --env GHOST_DATABASE_USER=bn_ghost \
  --env GHOST_DATABASE_PASSWORD=bitnami \
  --env GHOST_DATABASE_NAME=bitnami_ghost \
  --network ghost-network \
  --volume /path/to/ghost-persistence:/bitnami/ghost \
  bitnami/ghost:latest

Configuration

Environment variables

Customizable environment variables

Name	Description	Default Value
GHOST_DATA_TO_PERSIST	Files to persist relative to the Ghost installation directory. To provide multiple values, separate them with a whitespace.	content config.production.json
GHOST_ENABLE_HTTPS	Whether to enable HTTPS for Ghost by default.	no
GHOST_EXTERNAL_HTTP_PORT_NUMBER	External HTTP port for Ghost.	80
GHOST_EXTERNAL_HTTPS_PORT_NUMBER	External HTTPS port for Ghost.	443
GHOST_HOST	Ghost host name.	localhost
GHOST_PORT_NUMBER	Port number in which Ghost will run.	nil
GHOST_BLOG_TITLE	Ghost blog title.	"User's blog"
GHOST_SKIP_BOOTSTRAP	Whether to perform initial bootstrapping for the application.	nil
GHOST_USERNAME	Ghost user name.	user
GHOST_PASSWORD	Ghost user password.	bitnami123
GHOST_EMAIL	Ghost user e-mail address.	user@example.com
GHOST_SMTP_FROM_ADDRESS	Ghost SMTP from address.	nil
GHOST_SMTP_HOST	Ghost SMTP server host.	nil
GHOST_SMTP_PORT_NUMBER	Ghost SMTP server port number.	nil
GHOST_SMTP_USER	Ghost SMTP server user.	nil
GHOST_SMTP_PASSWORD	Ghost SMTP server user password.	nil
GHOST_SMTP_PROTOCOL	Ghost SMTP server protocol to use.	nil
GHOST_DATABASE_HOST	Database server host.	$GHOST_DEFAULT_DATABASE_HOST
GHOST_DATABASE_PORT_NUMBER	Database server port.	3306
GHOST_DATABASE_NAME	Database name.	bitnami_ghost
GHOST_DATABASE_USER	Database user name.	bn_ghost
GHOST_DATABASE_PASSWORD	Database user password.	nil
GHOST_DATABASE_ENABLE_SSL	Whether to enable SSL for database connection	no
GHOST_DATABASE_SSL_CA_FILE	Path to the database SSL CA file	nil

Read-only environment variables

Name	Description	Value
GHOST_BASE_DIR	Ghost installation directory.	${BITNAMI_ROOT_DIR}/ghost
GHOST_BIN_DIR	Ghost bin directory.	${GHOST_BASE_DIR}/bin
GHOST_LOG_FILE	Ghost log file.	${GHOST_BASE_DIR}/content/logs/ghost.log
GHOST_CONF_FILE	Configuration file for Ghost.	${GHOST_BASE_DIR}/config.production.json
GHOST_PID_FILE	Path to the Ghost PID file.	${GHOST_BASE_DIR}/.ghostpid
GHOST_VOLUME_DIR	Ghost directory for mounted configuration files.	${BITNAMI_VOLUME_DIR}/ghost
GHOST_DAEMON_USER	Ghost system user.	ghost
GHOST_DAEMON_GROUP	Ghost system group.	ghost
GHOST_DEFAULT_PORT_NUMBER	Default Ghost port number to enable at build time.	2368
GHOST_DEFAULT_DATABASE_HOST	Default database server host.	mysql

When you start the Ghost image, you can adjust the configuration of the instance by passing one or more environment variables either on the docker-compose file or on the docker run command line. If you want to add a new environment variable:

• For docker-compose add the variable name and value under the application section in the docker-compose.yml file present in this repository:

  ghost:
    ...
    environment:
      - GHOST_PASSWORD=my_password
    ...
  

• For manual execution add a --env option with each variable and value:

  $ docker run -d --name ghost -p 80:8080 -p 443:8443 \
    --env GHOST_PASSWORD=my_password \
    --network ghost-tier \
    --volume /path/to/ghost-persistence:/bitnami/ghost \
    bitnami/ghost:latest
  

Examples

SMTP configuration using a Gmail account

This would be an example of SMTP configuration using a Gmail account:

• Modify the docker-compose.yml file present in this repository:

    ghost:
      ...
      environment:
        - GHOST_DATABASE_USER=bn_ghost
        - GHOST_DATABASE_NAME=bitnami_ghost
        - ALLOW_EMPTY_PASSWORD=yes
        - GHOST_SMTP_HOST=smtp.gmail.com
        - GHOST_SMTP_PORT=587
        - GHOST_SMTP_USER=your_email@gmail.com
        - GHOST_SMTP_PASSWORD=your_password
        - GHOST_SMTP_FROM_ADDRESS=ghost@blog.com
    ...
  

• For manual execution:

  $ docker run -d --name ghost -p 80:8080 -p 443:8443 \
    --env GHOST_DATABASE_USER=bn_ghost \
    --env GHOST_DATABASE_NAME=bitnami_ghost \
    --env GHOST_SMTP_HOST=smtp.gmail.com \
    --env GHOST_SMTP_PORT=587 \
    --env GHOST_SMTP_USER=your_email@gmail.com \
    --env GHOST_SMTP_PASSWORD=your_password \
    --env GHOST_SMTP_FROM_ADDRESS=ghost@blog.com \
    --network ghost-tier \
    --volume /path/to/ghost-persistence:/bitnami \
    bitnami/ghost:latest
  

Connect Ghost container to an existing database

The Bitnami Ghost container supports connecting the Ghost application to an external database. This would be an example of using an external database for Ghost.

• Modify the docker-compose.yml file present in this repository:

     ghost:
       ...
       environment:
  -      - GHOST_DATABASE_HOST=mysql
  +      - GHOST_DATABASE_HOST=mysql_host
         - GHOST_DATABASE_PORT_NUMBER=3306
         - GHOST_DATABASE_NAME=ghost_db
         - GHOST_DATABASE_USER=ghost_user
  -      - ALLOW_EMPTY_PASSWORD=yes
  +      - GHOST_DATABASE_PASSWORD=ghost_password
       ...
  

• For manual execution:

  $ docker run -d --name ghost\
    -p 8080:8080 -p 8443:8443 \
    --network ghost-network \
    --env GHOST_DATABASE_HOST=mysql_host \
    --env GHOST_DATABASE_PORT_NUMBER=3306 \
    --env GHOST_DATABASE_NAME=ghost_db \
    --env GHOST_DATABASE_USER=ghost_user \
    --env GHOST_DATABASE_PASSWORD=ghost_password \
    --volume ghost_data:/bitnami/ghost \
    bitnami/ghost:latest
  

In case the database already contains data from a previous Ghost installation, you need to set the variable GHOST_SKIP_BOOTSTRAP to yes. Otherwise, the container would execute the installation wizard and could modify the existing data in the database. Note that, when setting GHOST_SKIP_BOOTSTRAP to yes, values for environment variables such as GHOST_USERNAME, GHOST_PASSWORD or GHOST_EMAIL will be ignored.

FIPS configuration in Bitnami Secure Images

The Bitnami Ghost Docker image from the Bitnami Secure Images catalog includes extra features and settings to configure the container with FIPS capabilities. You can configure the next environment variables:

• OPENSSL_FIPS: whether OpenSSL runs in FIPS mode or not. yes (default), no.

Logging

The Bitnami Ghost Docker image sends the container logs to stdout. To view the logs:

docker logs ghost

Or using Docker Compose:

docker-compose logs ghost

You can configure the containers logging driver using the --log-driver option if you wish to consume the container logs differently. In the default configuration docker uses the json-file driver.

Maintenance

Backing up your container

To backup your data, configuration and logs, follow these simple steps:

Step 1: Stop the currently running container

docker stop ghost

Or using Docker Compose:

docker-compose stop ghost

Step 2: Run the backup command

We need to mount two volumes in a container we will use to create the backup: a directory on your host to store the backup in, and the volumes from the container we just stopped so we can access the data.

docker run --rm -v /path/to/ghost-backups:/backups --volumes-from ghost busybox \
  cp -a /bitnami/ghost /backups/latest

Restoring a backup

Restoring a backup is as simple as mounting the backup as volumes in the containers.

For the MySQL database container:

 $ docker run -d --name mysql \
   ...
-  --volume /path/to/mysql-persistence:/bitnami/mysql \
+  --volume /path/to/mysql-backups/latest:/bitnami/mysql \
   bitnami/mysql:latest

For the Ghost container:

 $ docker run -d --name ghost \
   ...
-  --volume /path/to/ghost-persistence:/bitnami/ghost \
+  --volume /path/to/ghost-backups/latest:/bitnami/ghost \
   bitnami/ghost:latest

Upgrade this image

Bitnami provides up-to-date versions of MySQL and Ghost, including security patches, soon after they are made upstream. We recommend that you follow these steps to upgrade your container. We will cover here the upgrade of the Ghost container. For the MySQL upgrade see: https://github.com/bitnami/containers/blob/main/bitnami/mysql/README.md#upgrade-this-image

The bitnami/ghost:latest tag always points to the most recent release. To get the most recent release you can simple repull the latest tag from the Docker Hub with docker pull bitnami/ghost:latest. However it is recommended to use tagged versions.

Step 1: Get the updated image

docker pull bitnami/ghost:latest

Step 2: Stop the running container

Stop the currently running container using the command

docker-compose stop ghost

Step 3: Take a snapshot of the application state

Follow the steps in Backing up your container to take a snapshot of the current application state.

Step 4: Remove the currently running container

Remove the currently running container by executing the following command:

docker-compose rm -v ghost

Step 5: Run the new image

Update the image tag in docker-compose.yml and re-create your container with the new image:

docker-compose up -d

Customize this image

The Bitnami Ghost Docker image is designed to be extended so it can be used as the base image for your custom web applications.

Extend this image

To do so, create your own image using a Dockerfile with the format below:

FROM bitnami/ghost
## Put your customizations below
...

This example shows how to install the Storage Adapter for S3.

FROM bitnami/ghost:latest

## Change user to perform privileged actions
USER root

COPY post_ghost_config.sh /
RUN mkdir -p /.npm \
    && chmod -R g+rwX,o+rw /.npm \
    && chmod +x /post_ghost_config.sh \
    && cp /opt/bitnami/scripts/ghost/entrypoint.sh /tmp/entrypoint.sh \
    && sed '/info "\*\* Ghost setup finished! \*\*"/ a . /post_ghost_config.sh' /tmp/entrypoint.sh > /opt/bitnami/scripts/ghost/entrypoint.sh
ENV AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID="AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID" \
    AWS_ACCESS_SECRET_KEY="AWS_ACCESS_SECRET_KEY" \
    AWS_REGION="AWS_REGION" \
    AWS_BUCKET="AWS_BUCKET"

## Revert to the original non-root user
USER 1001

RUN cd /bitnami/ghost \
    && npm i --silent ghost-storage-adapter-s3 \
    && mkdir -p /opt/bitnami/ghost/content/adapters/storage/s3 \
    && cp -r ./node_modules/ghost-storage-adapter-s3/* /opt/bitnami/ghost/content/adapters/storage/s3/

1. Prepare npm and install an adapter.
2. Add configuration for the adapter.

Create a script named post_ghost_config.sh using jq for adding configuration to the config.production.json

#!/bin/bash -e
cp /opt/bitnami/ghost/config.production.json /tmp/config.tmp.json

jq -r --arg keyId $AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID --arg accessKey $AWS_ACCESS_SECRET_KEY --arg region $AWS_REGION --arg bucket $AWS_BUCKET \
    '. + { storage: { active: "s3", s3: { accessKeyId: $keyId, secretAccessKey: $accessKey, region: $region, bucket: $bucket } } }' \
    /tmp/config.tmp.json > /opt/bitnami/ghost/config.production.json

Add it to the app-entrypoint.sh just after ghost is configured.

Finally, build the container and set the required environment variables to configure the adapter.

Notable Changes

3.42.5-debian-10-r67 and 4.8.4-debian-10-r7

• The size of the container image has been decreased.
• The configuration logic is now based on Bash scripts in the rootfs/ folder.
• It is now possible to import existing Ghost databases from other installations. In order to do this, use the environment variable GHOST_SKIP_BOOTSTRAP, which forces the container not to run the initial Ghost setup wizard.

0.11.10-r2

• The ghost container has been migrated to a non-root container approach. Previously the container run as root user and the ghost daemon was started as ghost user. From now own, both the container and the ghost daemon run as user 1001. As a consequence, the configuration files are writable by the user running the ghost process.

Contributing

We'd love for you to contribute to this container. You can request new features by creating an issue or submitting a pull request with your contribution.

Issues

If you encountered a problem running this container, you can file an issue. For us to provide better support, be sure to fill the issue template.

License

Copyright © 2025 Broadcom. The term "Broadcom" refers to Broadcom Inc. and/or its subsidiaries.

Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the "License"); you may not use this file except in compliance with the License. You may obtain a copy of the License at

http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0

Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS, WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied. See the License for the specific language governing permissions and limitations under the License.