Ghost

Independent technology for modern publishing, memberships, subscriptions and newsletters

Alternative to: substack, medium, wordpress.com, patreon

Ghost is an independent, open source Node.js platform for professional publishing, letting you build a website, write and send email newsletters, and run paid membership and subscription businesses. It ships with a fast, modern editor and built-in SEO, membership, and payments tooling, so publishers get Substack- and WordPress-like features without extra plugins. Ghost can be fully self-hosted with the official Docker image, giving you complete ownership of your content and subscriber data instead of relying on a hosted SaaS.

Ghost Docker Compose example

Self-host Ghost on your own server, homelab, or VPS starting from this Docker Compose example. It runs Ghost in Docker containers using the official ghost:alpine, mysql:8.0 images, with persistent volumes and automatic restarts preconfigured. Review the environment variables and adjust them to your setup, save the file as compose.yml (or docker-compose.yml), and start the stack with docker compose up -d.

services:
  ghost:
    image: ghost:alpine
    restart: unless-stopped
    depends_on:
      db:
        condition: service_healthy
    environment:
      database__client: "mysql"
      database__connection__host: "db"
      database__connection__user: "ghost"
      # Password for the ghost database user. Must match MYSQL_PASSWORD on the db service.
      database__connection__password: "changeme"
      database__connection__database: "ghost"
      # The full public URL of your Ghost site. Ghost builds all links and redirects from this value.
      url: "http://localhost:2368"
      NODE_ENV: "production"
    volumes:
      - content:/var/lib/ghost/content

  db:
    image: mysql:8.0
    restart: unless-stopped
    environment:
      # Root password for MySQL. Only used internally on the compose network.
      MYSQL_ROOT_PASSWORD: "changeme_root"
      MYSQL_DATABASE: "ghost"
      MYSQL_USER: "ghost"
      # Password for the ghost database user. Must match database__connection__password on the ghost service.
      MYSQL_PASSWORD: "changeme"
    volumes:
      - db:/var/lib/mysql
    healthcheck:
      test: ["CMD", "mysqladmin", "ping", "-h", "localhost"]
      interval: 10s
      timeout: 5s
      retries: 10

volumes:
  content:
  db:

Values set to changeme are required — replace them with your own values before starting Ghost.

Prefer a managed setup? WinterFlow installs, configures, and updates Ghost for you using this same Docker Compose configuration.