---
title: "Deploy Ghost (Substack / Medium Alternative)"
description: "Self-hosted publishing & newsletter platform. Own your audience."
category: "CMS"
url: https://railway.com/deploy/ghost-substack-medium-alternativebold-bl
---

# Deploy Ghost (Substack / Medium Alternative)

Self-hosted publishing & newsletter platform. Own your audience.

**[Deploy Ghost (Substack / Medium Alternative) on Railway](https://railway.com/template/ghost-substack-medium-alternativebold-bl)**

Machine-readable deploy manifest (JSON, validated by TemplateCI): https://railway.com/deploy/ghost-substack-medium-alternativebold-bl/manifest.json

- **Creator:** Nick K's Projects
- **Category:** CMS
- **Total deploys:** 1

## Template content

### MySQL https://devicons.railway.app/i/mysql.svg

- **Image:** mysql:8.4
- **Start command:** `docker-entrypoint.sh mysqld --innodb-use-native-aio=0 --disable-log-bin --performance_schema=0 --innodb-buffer-pool-size=1G`

### ghost:5.130.6

- **Image:** ghost:5.130.6
- **Public domain:** Yes

## Documentation

# Deploy and Host Ghost on Railway

Ghost is a powerful open-source publishing and newsletter platform — a self-hosted alternative to Substack, Medium, and Mailchimp. It combines a professional blog, membership site, and email newsletter system in one, giving you full ownership of your content, audience, and revenue with no per-subscriber fees. This template deploys the official Ghost image backed by a managed MySQL 8 database, wired for private networking with a persistent volume so your posts, members, and settings survive every redeploy. [Updated August '26]

## About Hosting Ghost

Ghost requires MySQL in production (SQLite is not supported), plus a persistent volume for uploaded images and themes at /var/lib/ghost/content. This template provisions both automatically: a dedicated MySQL 8.4 service reachable over Railway's private network, and a volume on the Ghost service. The public URL is injected on first boot so links, admin, and outbound email all resolve correctly with zero manual configuration.

## Common Use Cases

- Running a paid newsletter or membership publication as a Substack alternative, keeping 100% of revenue
- Hosting a professional company blog or personal writing site you fully own and control
- Building a content-driven membership community with gated posts and paid tiers

## Dependencies for Ghost Hosting

- A MySQL 8 database (included as a managed service in this template)
- A persistent volume for content, images, and themes
- An SMTP provider such as Mailgun if you want to send member newsletters by email

## Why Deploy Ghost on Railway?

Railway provisions the full Ghost + MySQL stack in one click with private networking, a persistent volume, and a public domain already wired up. You avoid the most common cause of failed Ghost deployments — a missing or misconfigured database and site URL — because both are set correctly out of the box. As your audience grows, scale resources up from a single dashboard without touching infrastructure.

## Similar templates

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- [Instatic CMS - Postgres](https://railway.com/deploy/instatic-cms-postgres) — Design, build and manage powerful static sites from state-of-the-art CMS

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