Hosting your Ghost blog on GitHub pages for free

GitHub Pages is an amazing solution for hosting static websites. By using static site generators (like Jekyll, Hugo, Gatsby and many others) you can easily host your personal blog for free there.

But what if you're using a CMS like Ghost to manage your blog? Does that mean that you'll end up having to pay in order to host it?

Well, not necessarily. You can have a local installation of Ghost where you manage everything, then convert it to a static site and publish it for free every time you make changes! Let's get into more details regarding how to do that.

Assumptions

Before you continue with this article, you'll need to complete the following:

1. Have a running local installation of ghost on your machine. You can do that by following this guide.
2. If you're a Windows user, you'll need to have the Windows Subsystem for Linux enabled. Here's how you can do it.

Generating the static site

In order to generate the static site, we'll use the Ghost static site generator. With Linux and macOS, this tool can be used directly. However, it's more challenging when you're running on a Windows machine.

The reason for that is that this tool uses wget and grep under the hood. That's where the Windows subsystem for Linux comes to the rescue. If you're not using a windows machine, you can directly skip to step 2.

1. Prepare the environment (Windows only)

Launch the Linux shell and make sure to install npm inside it. To do that, you can run the following command:

sudo apt update && sudo apt install npm

2. Install the tool globally

You can do that by running:

sudo npm install -g ghost-static-site-generator

For windows users, you can now exit the Linux shell by running the exit command.

3. Generate the site

• Create an empty directory of your choice
• Open a terminal in this directory (Windows: press SHIFT + Right Click inside this directory then select "Open Linux shell here")
• Make sure your local ghost installation is running and accessible through the browser. By default it should be running on localhost with the port 2368
• Run the following command:

gssg --url https://username.github.io

This assumes you'll be pushing the code to your main GitHub site repository named username.github.io, where username is your username (or organization name) on GitHub.

In case you were using a custom URL or even publishing it to other providers like Netlify, change the URL accordingly. The important thing is that it matches the URL where the site will be deployed.

4. Deploy it online

By now, you should have a folder named static inside the folder you created earlier. This is where the entire static website has been generated. All you have to do is push this code to the repository and wait for it to be deployed.

Bonus: if you're using Netlify, you can also just drag and drop this folder into the sites section on your dashboard and it will be automatically deployed.

That's all! Whenever you create new content or update anything, all you need to do is repeat steps 3 and 4.

Small note: There's another possible approach that allows you to make this process even simpler, which is to use Ghost as a headless CMS for a static site generator (Gatsby, Hugo, Next.js, etc). If you'd like to know more about that, you can check the following links:

• Ghost on the JAMstack
• Using Ghost as a headless CMS for Gatsby
• Add a Netlify webhook for automatic deployments