While I’ve been hapily blogging away on Ghost version 0.8.0 hosted on azure (very much ad-hoc hosting approach) the Ghost Blog team made the leap to a 1.* version, with a very breaking changes along the way, especially to their upgrade process. They’ve made it all the way to 1.8.4 and so I figured it was time I upgraded.

This was going to be a nightmare if it wasn’t for two things.

Backup and Import

There is a great guide for upgrading put out by the Ghost Blog team: Migrating to 1.0.0. With this article, you can see the import and export instructions, specifically the backup your content section, and the Use the Ghost 1.0.0 importer section. Keep track of any themes and content images too.

chadly.net

Fortunately for me, someone else had also tried hosting ghost on Azure App Service Windows instances. Needless to say, this has a few gotchas so having someone to follow makes all the difference.

chadly.net is a blog running using Ghost, and helpfully documented how they got a recent version running on Azure in their Host Ghost 1.0 on Azure for Free article.

Some parts where I got stuck and had to resolve some issues.

Firstly, I had to actually use deployments from source control. This is in the instructions and works great as described. Trying to use the hacky way I had been using was no longer working and I should have just done it right in the first place.

Secondly, I had to patch my code version the same was as in New Configuration System section, which comes from this PR in the repo.

Also, again, I had to actually use the webconfig settings from the chadly repo, my old ones didn’t quite work as expected (again, another hack job averted). (Specifically Whats in this PR)

Don’t forget the parts about the config files, and creating and uploading the ghost.db file manually.

So that’s me back up and running, a saturday wasted, and now I can use ghost blog editor apps that now require the 1.* api. Thanks @chadly!