How to Setup Ghost on Microsoft Azure (2023) - Step by Step

Blogging has become a one of the most popular medium for sharing your knowledge, expressing yourself, and building your personal brand in today's digital world. If you are a blogger you may find a solution for smooth and simple process for publishing your content on the internet. The Ghost is one of the most popular content publishing platforms that does a great job of making that procedure simply and effectively.

What is Ghost?

One of the most widely used publishing platforms is Ghost, which can be used for your personal blogs to large news websites. It is also open-source so you can use it as completely free with a self hosted plan. Otherwise you may need to pay if you host Ghost on ghost.org

What is Bitnami?

Bitnami offers pre-packaged application that can deploy on any platform, that including cloud environments. They provide wide variety of applications such as WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, and more.Bitnami applications are fully compatible with Microsoft Azure.

If you explore the marketplace section in your Azure account and search for Bitnami on the search bar of the marketplace, you will discover a collection of Bitnami application packages that are available for deployment.

Create a Ghost Application on Azure

Select the application Ghost packaged by Bitnami and continue with the provided configuration steps to initiate the deployment of the application.

Once you select the correct configuration of your Ghost application you can simply click on Review + create. It will show the summary of your application that you are going to create on your VM (Virtual Machine) and you can confirm it by pressing create button.

This process will create a virtual machine in Azure, and it will install the Bitnami Ghost image on that virtual machine.

Add a DNS Name for Your VM

After the deployment is finished, access the virtual machine. In the Overview tab, find the DNS name and click on Not configure.

After clicking Not configure in the DNS name section, you can enter the desired name into the DNS name label as shown below.

At this point, your site should be accessible.

In my case my site url is http://myblog.westus3.cloudapp.azure.com/ . You may find out your hosted ghost web application url in the DNS name label section.

To Access the Ghost Admin Panel

To access the Ghost admin panel, you can follow these steps:

1. Access your Azure virtual machine.
2. Click on the Boot Diagnostics tab.

3. In the Serial log search for the default username and password for the Ghost application. You can simply press ctrl+f to find the username and the password. Otherwise it will be messy.

By following these steps, you'll be able to access the Ghost admin panel on your Azure virtual machine.

To access admin panel add /ghost after your main url. In my case the url is: http://myblog.westus3.cloudapp.azure.com/ghost 

In this tutorial, we explore how to setup Ghost on Microsoft Azure. By following these steps above mentioned you may quickly set up a Ghost blog in Microsoft Azure. We also discussed how to get accessibility to the Ghost admin panel for managing your blog content. Thank you for reading this article. Happy Blogging 🥳️.