Published

Ghost

Open-source publishing platform for blogs and newsletters, with members, paid subscriptions, email newsletters and a built-in editor. The self-hosted stack is the Ghost Node.js app and MySQL; transactional mail needs an SMTP provider and newsletters need Mailgun.

Resources by load level

What the app itself needs at each level, next to what we recommend for a server that runs only this app.

Level	What it means	App requirements	Recommended
LightEstimate	1–2 staff users, ~100 posts with ~4 images each, ~8 new posts a month, ~1,000 page views a day, up to 500 members and a weekly newsletter.	0.75 vCPU · 1.5 GiB RAM · 4.5 GiB disk	1.02 vCPU · 3.3 GiB RAM · 14.605 GiB disk
MediumEstimate	Up to 5 staff users, ~1,000 posts, ~40 new posts a month, ~20,000 page views a day without a cache, ~5,000 members and a weekly newsletter.	1.5 vCPU · 2 GiB RAM · 24 GiB disk	1.92 vCPU · 3.9 GiB RAM · 37.03 GiB disk
HeavyEstimate	Up to 20 staff users, ~5,000 posts, ~150 new posts a month, ~200,000 page views a day behind a CDN or cache, ~50,000 members and weekly newsletters.	2.5 vCPU · 3.5 GiB RAM · 108 GiB disk	3.12 vCPU · 5.7 GiB RAM · 133.63 GiB disk

Recommended = app requirements + system baseline + safety headroom, under sizing policy 2026.10.0. Options stay at their defaults. “Estimate” means the sources give no number for that case, so it is worked out from them by the method stated under Components. How the numbers are built

Size it in the Stack Sizer

Ready-to-run files

Support level Supported

Compose template from the official sources; not yet verified by a run.

Create docker-compose

Components

What each component needs at each load level, before baseline and headroom.

vCPU / GiB RAM / GiB disk
Component	Light	Medium	Heavy	Sources
Ghost (web, Admin and APIs) (app)	0.5 / 0.75 / 3	1 / 1 / 21	1.5 / 1.5 / 100	[5][6][7][21][22][24][32][41]
MySQL (database)	0.25 / 0.75 / 1.5	0.5 / 1 / 3	1 / 2 / 8	[6][42][43][44][45]

How the estimates are worked out

Ghost (web, Admin and APIs) · Light: Ghost asks for at least 1 GB of memory for Ghost, MySQL and the web server, and its Docker guide uses a 2 GB / 1 vCPU server for Ghost, MySQL and Caddy: 0.75 GiB and half a core for the single Node process here. Disk: 209,530,515 B compressed × 3 (0.585 GiB) rounded up to 0.75 GiB + 100 posts × 4 images × an assumed 5 MiB (original kept as _o plus resized copies) = 1.95 GiB, rounded up to 3 GiB.
Ghost (web, Admin and APIs) · Medium: 20,000 views a day is ~0.23 a second on average and a few a second at peaks, all rendered by Ghost itself, plus image processing on upload and newsletter sends to 5,000 members: one core and 1 GiB. Disk: 0.75 GiB image + 1,000 posts × 4 images × an assumed 5 MiB (19.5 GiB), rounded up to 21 GiB.
Ghost (web, Admin and APIs) · Heavy: Ghost runs as one process per site and says to scale with a cache or CDN in front, so most of the ~2.3 views a second never reach it. 1.5 vCPU / 1.5 GiB: the Node event loop plus image processing and rendering newsletters for 50,000 members (sent through Mailgun). Disk: 0.75 GiB image + 5,000 posts × 4 images × an assumed 5 MiB (97.7 GiB), rounded up to 100 GiB.
MySQL · Light: MySQL's defaults are made to start on a ~512 MB VM with a 128 MB buffer pool; Ghost keeps a pool of 2 to 10 connections: 0.75 GiB. Disk: 238,271,431 B × 3 (0.666 GiB) rounded up to 0.75 GiB + an assumed 0.1 GiB of posts, members and newsletter recipient rows + 100 MB redo log + an assumed 0.5 GiB of binary logs (kept 30 days by default) = 1.45 GiB, rounded up to 1.5 GiB.
MySQL · Medium: Data: 1,000 posts × an assumed 100 KB (content, HTML and revisions) + 5,000 members × 5 KB + 5,000 recipients × 4 newsletters × 12 months × 1 KB = 0.37 GB, ~0.5 GiB. 1 GiB leaves room to raise the 128 MB buffer pool to the whole database. Disk: 0.75 GiB image + 0.5 GiB data + 0.1 GiB redo + an assumed 1 GiB of binary logs = 2.35 GiB, rounded up to 3 GiB.
MySQL · Heavy: Data: 5,000 posts × 100 KB + 50,000 members × 5 KB + 50,000 recipients × 4 × 12 months × 1 KB = 3.15 GB, ~4 GiB. 2 GiB fits a 1 GiB buffer pool (MySQL recommends 50 to 75% of memory), set with --innodb-buffer-pool-size. Disk: 0.75 GiB image + 4 GiB data + 0.1 GiB redo + an assumed 2 GiB of binary logs = 6.85 GiB, rounded up to 8 GiB.

Ports

Public ports are meant to be reached from outside the stack, usually through a reverse proxy; internal ones stay on the stack's own network.

Component	Port	Exposure	Purpose	Sources
Ghost (web, Admin and APIs)	2368/tcp	Public, through a proxy	Site, members area, Admin (/ghost) and the Content and Admin APIs (HTTP; put behind TLS)	[3][7]
MySQL	3306/tcp	Internal only	MySQL client protocol for Ghost	[1][15]

Every port in the catalog, with conflicts between apps

User and permissions (UID/GID)

The user each container's process runs as, and the paths it writes to. A bind mount for one of these paths must be writable by that UID:GID.

Component	UID:GID	User	Starts as root	Writes to	Sources
Ghost (web, Admin and APIs)Derived	1000:1000	`node`	Yes, prepares its directories, then drops to this user	`/var/lib/ghost/content`	[6][7][8][9]
MySQL	999:999	`mysql`	Yes, prepares its directories, then drops to this user	`/var/lib/mysql/var/run/mysqld`	[15][16]

Ghost (web, Admin and APIs): The image sets no USER: the entrypoint starts as root, chowns files in /var/lib/ghost/content to node and re-executes itself with gosu node (uid and gid 1000 in the node:22-alpine base). The content path holds Ghost's data, images, themes, logs and adapters folders.

Storage growth

How much each component's data grows per month at each load level, on top of the disk in the profile. A value marked Assumption is ANAROQ's stated assumption, not a figure from the sources; the notes say what it rests on.

GiB per month
Component	Light	Medium	Heavy	Sources
Ghost (web, Admin and APIs)Assumption	0.156	0.781	2.93	[6][7]
MySQLAssumption	0.003	0.022	0.2	[6][45]

What the growth figures rest on

Ghost (web, Admin and APIs): New posts a month (8, 40, 150) × 4 images × an assumed 5 MiB: Ghost resizes uploads to 2,000 px and keeps the original with an _o suffix, and themes add smaller sizes. Nothing expires; Ghost's rotated log files (daily, 10 kept) also sit in this volume.
MySQL: Members × 4 newsletters a month × an assumed 1 KB per recipient row, plus new posts × 100 KB (content, HTML and revisions). Binary logs add a steady window rather than growth: they expire after 30 days by default.

Upgrade and rollback

How to move to a new version safely, and how to go back if it fails.

Back up first

Take a mysqldump of the ghost database and an archive of the content volume first; database migrations cannot be undone by an older image. [28][29]

Upgrade steps

Read the release notes and, before a new major, the breaking changes; Ghost advises moving to a new major after its first minor release. [26][27][28]
Change the pinned ghost tag (keep the -alpine variant), then run docker compose pull and docker compose up -d. Ghost migrates its database at boot; follow docker compose logs -f ghost until it serves again. [5][36]
Move MySQL only between 8.4.x patch tags: Ghost supports MySQL 8.0 and 8.4, not 9.x. [20][21]

Roll back

Stop Ghost, restore the database dump and the content archive from before the upgrade, pin the previous tag and start again. [29]

Known breaking changes

In 6.0.0: Node.js 22 only (the image ships it). API requests return at most 100 items, ?limit=all included, so integrations must paginate. AMP and GET /ghost/api/admin/session/ were removed; extensionless files in a theme's root are no longer served. [25][27]
In 5.0.0: MySQL 8 is the only supported database (MySQL 5 no longer works, MariaDB was never supported); API URLs lost their version and use the accept-version header; a url set to http no longer serves secure requests. [23][27]

Limits

One Ghost instance per site: clustering, load balancing and multi-server setups are not supported. Scale by putting a cache or CDN in front. [21][24]
Email newsletters need Mailgun's bulk API, set in Ghost Admin; SMTP (the smtp option) only carries transactional mail. Without Mailgun, members can still sign up but posts are not emailed. [6][32]
Social Web (ActivityPub) and web analytics are off in this template. The first needs three routes to https://ap.ghost.org at your proxy (free hosted service, up to 2,000 followers and 100 interactions a day); the second needs Tinybird and upstream's analytics services. [4][5]
MySQL keeps its defaults: a 128 MB buffer pool and 30 days of binary logs in the data volume. On the heavy level, raise the pool with --innodb-buffer-pool-size; Ghost-CLI's nginx allows 50 MB uploads, so set a similar body limit at your proxy. [30][43][44][45]

Security

The first visitor to /ghost creates the owner account: setup stays open until it is done once. Complete it right after the first start, before the site is reachable from the internet. [5][34]
Sign-in from a new device needs a code Ghost emails to the staff user, and fails if the email can't be sent. Turn on the smtp option before signing in from a second browser or inviting staff. [31][33][35]
Serve Ghost over HTTPS (Admin must run over it) and have the proxy send X-Forwarded-Proto: https; without it Ghost redirects to https in a loop. [11][21][30]
Every staff user is trusted and can publish scripts on the site. Ghost recommends a separate admin domain (admin__url, not set by the template) so such scripts can't reach the Admin session. [6][21][31]

Backup

Back up the database with mysqldump --no-tablespaces as the ghost user, the content volume (images, media, files, themes) with tar, and the .env. Ghost Admin's export lacks comments, member activity and media. [29][39]
To restore, stop Ghost, import the dump into the ghost database, unpack the content archive into the volume and start Ghost again. [29]