blog.vararu.org

A yak shaver's guide to upgrading Ghost from 0.5.9 to 0.11.3

This isn't so much a technical guide as it is me venting about my latest yak shave.

Ghost kept badgering me to update so I decided, what the hell, I'm bored, let's go.

  • Current version is 0.5.9, latest is 0.11.3, you need to do an intermediary update to 0.7.x.
  • wget 0.7.1, install it by manually copying and chowning files. Ponder why the maintainers don't have a script for this.
  • Run it, seems to work fine. On to the latest release I guess?
  • wget latest, do the copying dance again.
  • npm install fails because my node version is too old for Ghost. My blog server is running node v0.10. So yes, it is ancient.
  • apt-cache show nodejs has v0.6 as the latest available thing so that's a no-go.
  • Attempt to install node v7, get an error when piping curl to sudo bash (!) that my Ubuntu is too old.
  • Turns out I'm running 12.04. So yes, it is ancient.
  • Learn how to do a LTS upgrade on Ubuntu and succeed after 3 badgering curses prompts asking for explicit user confirmation about changing grub and various other arcane config files and a reboot.
  • Run apt-cache show nodejs for giggles, now the latest one is v0.10.
  • Install node v7 successfully using their curl | sudo bash command. Eat your hearts out, security pundits.
  • npm install fails because my node version is too old. What?
  • node -v is still v0.10, node v7 was linked as nodejs.
  • I'm losing my patience.
  • sudo mv /usr/bin/node /usr/bin/oldnode
  • sudo ln -s /usr/bin/nodejs /usr/bin/node
  • npm install fails because my node version is too new. Ghost decided to only support LTS versions, and hard fails when you use a newer one.
  • Very long and drawn out sigh.
  • Add GHOST_NODE_VERSION_CHECK=false to my shell in the hope that Ghost will pick it up when running scripts. Nope.
  • Uninstall node v7.
  • Install node v6.9.
  • npm install fails because ENOMEM. My VPS is running 512MB RAM and doesn't have any swap.
  • Learn how to add and use a swapfile on Ubuntu.
  • npm install finally works and I'm running my blog again.

On the bright side, I learned two more things I'll probably never need again about Ubuntu.