flux-get-started/charts/ghost

Ghost

Ghost is one of the most versatile open source content management systems on the market.

TL;DR;

$ helm install stable/ghost

Introduction

This chart bootstraps a Ghost deployment on a Kubernetes cluster using the Helm package manager.

It also packages the Bitnami MariaDB chart which is required for bootstrapping a MariaDB deployment for the database requirements of the Ghost application.

Prerequisites

• Kubernetes 1.4+ with Beta APIs enabled
• PV provisioner support in the underlying infrastructure

Installing the Chart

To install the chart with the release name my-release:

$ helm install --name my-release stable/ghost

The command deploys Ghost on the Kubernetes cluster in the default configuration. The configuration section lists the parameters that can be configured during installation.

Tip: List all releases using helm list

Uninstalling the Chart

To uninstall/delete the my-release deployment:

$ helm delete my-release

The command removes all the Kubernetes components associated with the chart and deletes the release.

Configuration

The following tables lists the configurable parameters of the Ghost chart and their default values.

Parameter	Description	Default
image	Ghost image	bitnami/ghost:{VERSION}
imagePullPolicy	Image pull policy	Always if image tag is latest, else IfNotPresent
ghostHost	Ghost host to create application URLs	nil
ghostPort	Ghost port to create application URLs along with host	80
ghostLoadBalancerIP	loadBalancerIP for the Ghost Service	nil
ghostUsername	User of the application	user@example.com
ghostPassword	Application password	Randomly generated
ghostEmail	Admin email	user@example.com
ghostBlogTitle	Ghost Blog name	User's Blog
allowEmptyPassword	Allow DB blank passwords	yes
externalDatabase.host	Host of the external database	nil
externalDatabase.user	Existing username in the external db	bn_ghost
externalDatabase.password	Password for the above username	nil
externalDatabase.database	Name of the existing database	bitnami_ghost
mariadb.enabled	Whether or not to install MariaDB (disable if using external)	true
mariadb.mariadbRootPassword	MariaDB admin password	nil
mariadb.mariadbDatabase	MariaDB Database name to create	bitnami_ghost
mariadb.mariadbUser	MariaDB Database user to create	bn_ghost
mariadb.mariadbPassword	MariaDB Password for user	random 10 character long alphanumeric string
serviceType	Kubernetes Service type	LoadBalancer
persistence.enabled	Enable persistence using PVC	true
persistence.storageClass	PVC Storage Class for Ghost volume	nil (uses alpha storage annotation)
persistence.accessMode	PVC Access Mode for Ghost volume	ReadWriteOnce
persistence.size	PVC Storage Request for Ghost volume	8Gi
resources	CPU/Memory resource requests/limits	Memory: 512Mi, CPU: 300m

The above parameters map to the env variables defined in bitnami/ghost. For more information please refer to the bitnami/ghost image documentation.

Note:

For the Ghost application function correctly, you should specify the ghostHost parameter to specify the FQDN (recommended) or the public IP address of the Ghost service.

Optionally, you can specify the ghostLoadBalancerIP parameter to assign a reserved IP address to the Ghost service of the chart. However please note that this feature is only available on a few cloud providers (f.e. GKE).

To reserve a public IP address on GKE:

$ gcloud compute addresses create ghost-public-ip

The reserved IP address can be associated to the Ghost service by specifying it as the value of the ghostLoadBalancerIP parameter while installing the chart.

Specify each parameter using the --set key=value[,key=value] argument to helm install. For example,

$ helm install --name my-release \
  --set ghostUsername=admin,ghostPassword=password,mariadb.mariadbRootPassword=secretpassword \
    stable/ghost

The above command sets the Ghost administrator account username and password to admin and password respectively. Additionally it sets the MariaDB root user password to secretpassword.

Alternatively, a YAML file that specifies the values for the above parameters can be provided while installing the chart. For example,

$ helm install --name my-release -f values.yaml stable/ghost

Tip: You can use the default values.yaml

Using an existing database

Sometimes you may want to have Ghost connect to an external database rather than installing one inside your cluster, e.g. to use a managed database service, or use run a single database server for all your applications. To do this, the chart allows you to specify credentials for an external database under the externalDatabase parameter. You should also disable the MariaDB installation with the mariadb.enabled option. For example:

$ helm install stable/ghost \
    --set mariadb.enabled=false,externalDatabase.host=myexternalhost,externalDatabase.user=myuser,externalDatabase.password=mypassword,externalDatabase.database=mydatabase

Persistence

The Bitnami Ghost image stores the Ghost data and configurations at the /bitnami/ghost and /bitnami/apache paths of the container.

Persistent Volume Claims are used to keep the data across deployments. This is known to work in GCE, AWS, and minikube. See the Configuration section to configure the PVC or to disable persistence.