Setting up ghost on Raspberry Pi for free

This is part of my Today I Learnt series where I share whatever I am learning something new. After having issues with port forwarding in Xfinity I decided to look for alternative solutions. I have used Cloudflare tunnel (used to be called Argo Tunnel) in the past to expose websites running on my laptop to the Internet. So, I decided to try it out for Ghost blogging site which I am setting up for my dad.

Things that I had already set up

1. Cloudflare free tier account and added the domain
2. Raspberry pi with Docker installed

The overall architecture looks like this:

Here are the steps which I did:

• Create a docker volume

docker volume create ghost-synergywin-net

• Create a docker container using ghost image [1]

docker run -d -e url=http://localhost:3001 -p 3001:2368 --name some-ghost -v ghost-synergywin-net:/var/lib/ghost/content ghost

I mapped raspberry pi port 3001 to containers port 2368 and passing environment variable url as localhost. Mounted the location /var/lib/ghost/content to ghost-synergywin-net volume.

• Confirm that the ghost site is up

curl http://localhost:3001

Next I replaced url environment variable with the actual domain

docker run -d -e url=https://synergywin.net -p 3001:2368 --name some-ghost -v ghost-synergywin-net:/var/lib/ghost/content ghost

Next is exposing this website securely to the Internet. Because, raspberry pi is running on my Local Area Network (LAN). I need to make it accessible from the Internet. To do that I used Cloudflare tunnel

• I added the domain synergywin.net to Cloudflare

• Installed [2] cloudflared executable on the Raspberry pi

• Authenticate [3] cloudflared which creates cert.pem file

• Created a tunnel
  

  cloudflared tunnel create ghost-synergywin-net

• Created a config file for the tunnel

credentials-file: /home/pi/.cloudflared/<uuid>.json
tunnel: <uuid>

ingress:
  - hostname: synergywin.net
    service: http://localhost:3001
  - service: http_status:404

• Added a CNAME in the Cloudflare dashboard for the hostname with .cfargotunnel.com
• Ran tunnel using the above config

cloudflared tunnel --config config.yaml run &

Actually, that is it. I am able to reach my dad's blog over the Internet now.

Bonus, I also got enabled using Cloudflare itself for free with just a click of a radio button :)

References:

1. https://hub.docker.com/_/ghost

2. https://developers.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-one/connections/connect-apps/install-and-setup/installation

3. https://developers.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-one/connections/connect-apps/install-and-setup/setup