I wanted something simpler to blog with, so I’m trying out Ghost. I’ve not hosted any Node apps before, but I already had a server set up running Passenger and Apache (I’ve not jumped on the Nginx bandwagon yet), so I wanted it to work nicely with that.

Having done maybe 2 hours of Node development in my life, I thought you had to have an app.js, but not so.

Here’s my vhost xfile[1][2]:

<VirtualHost *:80>
ServerAdmin webmaster@localhost
ServerName terrbear.org
ServerAlias www.terrbear.org
ServerAlias www.terrbear.ninja
ServerAlias terrbear.ninja

DocumentRoot /var/www/apps/ghost
PassengerAppRoot /var/www/apps/ghost
PassengerAppType node
PassengerStartupFile index.js
PassengerRestartDir /var/www/apps/ghost/tmp

ErrorLog /var/log/apache2/error.log

LogLevel warn

CustomLog /var/log/apache2/access.log combined
ServerSignature On
</VirtualHost>

Because Passenger in hosted environments automatically sets NODE_ENV to production, there wasn’t anything else to do here. I did update my config to use MySQL, which worked out of the box. If you’re looking to do the same, copy the travis-ci stanza out and use your own values.

[1] New installations of Apache search for sites-enabled/*.conf and mods-enabled/*.conf, so if you copied your old vhost file and can’t figure out why it’s not working, that might be a hint.

[2] Yes, I own terrbear.ninja. No, I don’t have DNS setup for it.