Dear Fedi friends,
It’s been a while since my last post about my self-hosting adventures.
The end of August is always a hectic time for my family, with my little one wrapping up her 2-month summer vacation, our return home to Paris, the need to get ready for the new school year and slowly readjusting our schedules and rhythms.
Confession: I didn’t have much time to pick up my intensive study of Docker - something I feel is absolutely mandatory for me because:
(a) I love Ghost.org (the platform this blog runs on)
(b) Ghost.org is moving the deployment of future versions to Docker ONLY.
Since learning about this a month ago, I have been feeling like a child who just learned to ride a bike without training wheels (Ghost CLI)… who is told she now has to go mountain biking on rough terrains (Docker). Wait what? I’m not ready for this, I just barely managed to learn how to bike on a regular road.
But thankfully the sense of urgency I felt when I learned about Ghost’s roadmap has gone away. As it turns out, numerous experienced developers who self-host Ghost and moved from CLI to Docker (what I need to do) have been voicing some frustrations about technical challenges and glitches they found following the move.
I’ve been following discussions on the Ghost Forum and a response by a Ghost staff member recently caught my attention.
Replying to a frustrated user who complained about the “not quite ready” status of Ghost v6, Hannah wrote:
You are welcome to self-host it yourself but you are EARLY - the self-hosting solution is not fully documented or tested yet.
We could have kept it closed source and tested it privately with only invited users for several months and risked the backlash for it not being open, or we could open it up early and have the whole community help get it polished. We chose the latter.
The ActivityPub, Analytics, Docker config and Documentation repositories are all open source and we welcome contributions and constructive feedback on what’s needed to get it “ready”.
Knowing that the Ghost team itself considers the self-hosted v6 as an early preview that needs polishing and contributions from the community makes me feel a lot better. I’m no longer in a rush to learn Docker ASAP to move my Ghost blog there. I’d rather wait for experienced developers to iron out issues… while I learn Docker little by little.
Zooming out and looking at the big picture, my Ghost blog - on v5 - works PERFECTLY right now. I don’t need built-in analytics because I already pay for Plausible analytics. I don’t need the blog to federate as I already have SEVENTEEN ActivityPub profiles and I’m looking to consolidate them.
I will set aside thirty minutes a day to learn Docker, but I’m no longer in a rush to move my Ghost blog there by the end of the year. It’s actually a big relief not to be in a rush but to enjoy the process. I will know when I am ready.
Thanks for being here,
Elena
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