Migrating My Blog from Drupal to Ghost

by Anam Ahmed

I am a Drupal Fan. Most of the CMS related work I did in PHP involved Drupal. So when it was time to make my own blog back in 2013, I chose Drupal without having second thought. Although WordPress was really popular and easier that time, I still went for Drupal. It was, in a sense, Like a tribute for me. I even kept the original "Powered by Drupal" footer.

This is how my blog used to look:

For the most part, It did what it was supposed to do. In fact, it did the job really well. I became busy to pay my bills, After every couple of month or more, I used to come to my blog, reset the password(because I keep forgetting it) and write an article, then forget about it.

This went on for quite some time, and one day a Facebook Friend of mine, Knocked me in messenger. He asked with my blog URL if it was my blog. I said yes it is! then what he did was surprising, and shocking. He sent me another URL, this time of a text file, hosted in My Freaking Server and when I followed the link, the text file contained: 

Dear brother, Your site has serious Vulnerability. That's how I could create this file.

I was shocked, in shame and  felt really bad for myself. I also felt really thankful to that person. He said this bug was a very old one, but as I did not update Drupal core for the last three years, it was still there. Definitely my laziness and carelessness was to blame for it.

I still thank god that it was spotted by a White Hat Hacker

I updated Drupal core and was saved that time. But I had a fear in my mind about it. I kept updating Drupal core every two month (Allthough I did not write any blog). But I was feeling that my 2013 blog was getting old, and updating was getting difficult.

The reasons behind the migration:

  1. The blog was hosted in a shared PHP hosting, Although one of my closest friends own that hosting company, I always felt lack of control. And if I needed to change anything on the server, it was time consuming. I did not have shell access so I could not use Drush with Drupal.
  2. To update Drupal core on that server, I had to backup the sites folder, delete everything, unzip the latest version, configure settings.php and then put back the sites folder. Obviously this process was not reliable. And there were always a chance for thousands of things to go wrong.
  3. My blog started to look Old. The theme was from 2013. The theme was built with older HTML and CSS, and the design was old.
  4. The blog was tough to scale. If I expected more load, I had to call the server administrator to increase resources (Already mentioned I was feeling lack of control)
  5. I wanted to go pure markdown. I installed markdown filter for Drupal and could write posts in markdown. But I always craved for a better editor inside the blog itself.
  6. My blog was using Drupal 7, a very old version in current days. At the time of writing this post Drupal 9 is already a thing. and Drupal 7 support is scheduled to end within a year.

With all the above reasons, It was a matter of choosing another blogging application. I had a lot of choices. I seriously considered going for a hosted platform like wix or SquareSpace. Then what's the fun in that?

I had a crush on Ghost since the day it was released.I liked it a lot. I even wrote a blog post about it. And if you go to the previous post in my blog (Which is in Bangla) I talked about my journey of learning Docker. I thought to myself, this could be a great Practice project! So I decided to create my blog with Ghost, inside a docker container.

The Approach I took

There were some simple steps I had to take in order to get my ghost blog up and running. Here's what I did:

  1. Bought a droplet in Digital Ocean , Configured it with Ubuntu.
  2. Installed docker in the droplet.
  3. Created a folder for the ghost application, created a docker-compose.yml file in that folder, and created a folder data to persist data (did not use mysql, went with sqlite for the first version) and here's how my compose file looks like:
version: "3"

services:
    ghostapp:
       image: ghost:2
       ports:
         - "2368:2368"
       volumes:
         - ./data:/var/lib/ghost/content
       restart: always
       environment:
         - NODE_ENV=production
         - url=https://blog.anam.co

If you want to know more about docker compose. You can learn it from Here

Then I ran the command docker-compose up -d and the application started. Only thing left was to configure nginx to forward traffic to it.

So, I wrote a reverse-proxy configuration in nginx, that looks something like the following:

server{
   server_name blog.anam.co;
   listen 80;
   location /{
	proxy_pass http://localhost:2368;
	proxy_set_header Host $host;
	proxy_set_header X-Real-Ip $remote_addr;
	proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
        proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-Proto $scheme;
   }
}

And then I needed to install SSL certificate. For that I used Let's encrypt's SSL via their certbot (It's really simple I might write a blog post about it in the future)

And the last thing I did was pointing the domain blog.anam.co to the new server.

Then I manually migrated all the contents from the older server to the new one (did not automate or look for any tool as there were only a few articles)

And like that..The migration was complete.

If I share this post, you'll know that everything went well.