Ghost Blog deployed in docker using ansible and vagrant

Prerequisites

• Vagrant
• Virtualbox

Getting started

For starting all you need is vagrant and virtualbox, once you have them you can start by installing the virtualbox guest additions plugin by vagrant and getting the VM up.

Run the following command for installing the plugin:

vagrant plugin install vagrant-vbguest

This is required because the virtualbox guest additions in the VM might be a different version from the host version of VirtualBox and this causes problems while sharing folders. Once the plugin is installed, you can start the VM:

vagrant up

This might take a while since it will be downloading the debian box, then it will install all of the required tools and docker images to run ghost inside docker in the VM.

After all of the provisioning finishes, you can open the Ghost platform on your host browser: https://localhost:8080 And for the admin panel: https://localhost:8080/ghost

Project layout

The project uses vagrant to spin up a debian 10 VM and then uses the shell and ansible_local vagrant provisioners. The shell is used to execute the bootstrap.sh which will install ansible in the VM, we do this so we can use later the ansible_local provisioner to install and configure docker and start our docker compose project.

1. Vagrantfile (This should be self explanotory, we configure a VM with 2 GB of RAM, share this folder to the VM at /vagrant_data, forward the port from the host to the guest 443 -> 443, run the shell and ansible_local provisioners)
2. playbook (This is the main ansible playbook which will be run inside of the VM, it uses our custom roles to configure the VM)
3. ansible.cfg (This is the configuration file which will be used by ansible, the only thing that we define here is which python interpreter ansible should use, this is required since some of the tasks in the roles use pip to install modules)
4. roles (Here we define our custom roles, debian-base for updating the system and installing some required packages, debian-docker for installing docker and docker-compose in debian, docker-ghost for installing the prerequisites of the ghost package and running it using docker-compose)
5. docker (Here we define the ghost docker configuration files, we have the docker-compose.yml file which will start all of the required containers and will link them. We have our own custom nginx Dockerfile which adds certs and the ghost configuration)