Setting up Ghost in development mode on Mac

Situation: You want to evaluate Ghost on your local machine. You’ve never used nvm before. You can’t quite find a “just follow these steps” guide.

Here’s what I had to do (using Ghost v1.20.0).

• Open Terminal. Install nvm according to https://github.com/creationix/nvm.

  $ curl -o- https://raw.githubusercontent.com/creationix/nvm/v0.33.8/install.sh | bash
  

• Note the OS X advice about nvm: command not found. (I had to add source ~/.bashrc to my .bash_profile file.)
• Open a new Terminal window.

• Since Ghost only supports LTS versions of Node, use nvm to install it.

  $ nvm install --lts
  

• nvm will automatically be “using” this new version now, but you can select it later with:

  $ nvm use --lts
  

• Now, we’re ready to install the Ghost command-line interface:

  $ npm install -g ghost-cli
  

• Create an empty directory where you want your development installation of Ghost to live, then run the installer.

  $ mkdir myblog
  $ cd myblog
  $ ghost install local
  

• When the installer completes, you’ll get a URL to access it—something like like http://localhost:2368/. Open that URL in a browser. You’ll see some elegant, placeholder content.
• But you probably want to see the administrative interface, right? Visit http://localhost:2368/ghost/ and go through the quick setup process.
• I quickly got to a point where I wanted to start making my own content. Get rid of all the placeholder content by deleting the ghost user.