Deploy and Host Ghost on Railway

Ghost is a publishing platform: posts, pages, themes, members and paid newsletters, with an editor built for writing rather than for page-building.

About Hosting Ghost

This template runs the official ghost image on a pinned release, with MySQL and a persistent volume mounted at the content directory.

Both of those matter. Ghost keeps posts and members in MySQL, but themes, uploaded images and generated files live on disk under /var/lib/ghost/content. Without a volume every image you upload disappears with the next deploy, and the site keeps rendering broken links to files that are no longer there.

The image is pinned to a specific Ghost release instead of a moving tag, so a redeploy gives you the version you were running, not whatever shipped this morning.

Common Use Cases

A blog or company publication you own, on your own domain
A paid newsletter with members and subscriptions, without a per-subscriber platform fee
A documentation or changelog site fronted by a custom theme

Dependencies for Ghost Hosting

MySQL 8, included in this template. Ghost supports MySQL in production; SQLite is development-only.
A persistent volume, included, for themes, images and other uploaded files
SMTP credentials if you want member sign-in emails and newsletters. Add them as mail__* variables - Ghost runs without them, but no email leaves the site.

Deployment Dependencies

Ghost documentation: https://ghost.org/docs
Configuration reference: https://ghost.org/docs/config
Source: https://github.com/TryGhost/Ghost

Implementation Details

Open the site once it is up and go to /ghost to create the owner account. That first account owns the site.

Configuration is passed the way the official image expects, as double-underscore environment variables:

Variable	Why
url	The public address. Ghost writes it into links, feeds and emails, so it has to be right from the first boot
database__client, database__connection__*	Point Ghost at the bundled MySQL over the private network
PORT, server__port, server__host	Ghost listens on 2368; PORT is what Railway routes the public domain to
NODE_ENV	Production mode, so Ghost uses the configured database rather than a development fallback

The Ghost service restarts on failure. That is deliberate: on a cold start MySQL can still be initialising when Ghost first tries to connect, and Ghost exits rather than waiting. The retry brings it up once the database is ready, usually within a minute.

Why Deploy Ghost on Railway?

A self-hosted Ghost needs a database, a disk for uploads and a domain with TLS. Railway provides all three on a private network from one deploy, and the volume means your images are still there after the next release lands.