As a small team developing open source software that is free to use, we provide a narrow set of environments that are officially supported to keep maintenance manageable. Ghost is built for use with Ubuntu, MySQL 8, nginx and Node.js LTS. MySQL 8 provides features that are optimal for Ghost installations, including the ability to store JSON, and features that help us deliver performance improvements. If database interoperability is something that you are passionate about, consider supporting the knex project.

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How to check your current database in production

  • Use ghost ls to locate your install and navigate to its location.
  • Run ghost config database.client this should output sqlite3 or mysql.
  • If it says mysql, run mysql --version to find the details of your mysql install.

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How to update MySQL 5 to MySQL 8

This will happen automatically if you update your Ubuntu install to Ubuntu 20. Alternatively you can update MySQL using your package manager of choice. Once your MySQL package is updated, change your Ghost table collations to the new default ofutf8mb4_0900_ai_ci. Running the following command will generate a set of ALTER TABLE commands needed to correct your database: mysql <database> -u <username> -p -B --disable-column-names -h localhost -e 'SELECT CONCAT("ALTER TABLE ",TABLE_SCHEMA,".",TABLE_NAME," CHARACTER SET utf8mb4 COLLATE utf8mb4_0900_ai_ci; ", "ALTER TABLE ",TABLE_SCHEMA,".",TABLE_NAME," CONVERT TO CHARACTER SET utf8mb4 COLLATE utf8mb4_0900_ai_ci;") AS alter_sql FROM information_schema.TABLES WHERE TABLE_SCHEMA = database();' Once you have the alter table commands, run: mysql <database> -u <username> -p 'set foreign_key_checks=0; <ALTER TABLE COMMANDS> set foreign_key_checks=1;'

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How to migrate from MariaDB to MySQL 8

We strongly recommend migrating from MariaDB to MySQL 8 —a helpful guide can be found here.

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How to migrate from SQLite3

We strongly recommend switching to MySQL 8 by performing a full reinstall of Ghost.