I am trying to set up a brand new Ghost blog on a Centos 7 server. I have Nginx, Node and Ghost installed and have written all of the necessary configuration files. It's pretty close to working, but I wanted to use MySQL instead of SQLite, so I created a new (blank) MySQL database called "ghost_db", set up a MySQL user called "ghost", gave the user permission for the database, and added these lines to config.js:
database: {
client: 'mysql',
connection: {
host: 'localhost',
user: 'ghost',
password: 'mypassword',
database: 'ghost_db'
charset: 'utf8'
filename: path.join(__dirname, '/content/data/ghost-dev.db')
},
debug: false
}, ...
When I try to start it, I get an error that suggests I use knex-migrator to initialize the database.
[john@a ghost]$ npm start
> ghost@1.18.4 start /var/www/ghost
> node index
[2017-12-10 00:08:00] ERROR
NAME: DatabaseIsNotOkError
CODE: MIGRATION_TABLE_IS_MISSING
MESSAGE: Please run knex-migrator init ...
However, some comments on Stackexchange suggest that using knex-migrate may be unnecessary for this version of Ghost, and when I run knex-migrator, it also fails:
[john@a ghost]$ knex-migrator init
[2017-12-09 16:21:33] ERROR
NAME: RollbackError
CODE: SQLITE_ERROR
MESSAGE: delete from "migrations" where "name" = '2-create-fixtures.js' and "version" = 'init' and "currentVersion" = '1.18' - SQLITE_ERROR: no such table: migrations
...[omitted]
Error: SQLITE_ERROR: no such table: migrations
I think the problem may be that the "ghost_db" database I initially created is blank. The "ghost-dev.db" file that is pointed to in the config.js seems to be for SQLite, but I get the same error message if I switch config.js back to using an SQLite database. I don't know what the "migrations" table is. I found the schema that I think Ghost expects at [https://github.com/TryGhost/Ghost/blob/1.16.2/core/server/data/schema/schema.js], but I'm not sure how to use that to initialize the tables, etc., except for doing it very laboriously by hand. I'm stumped!
I took an alternate approach which proved successful, which was to install Ghost as an NPM module. The official Ghost instructions label this as an "advanced" process, but it wasn't too difficult to follow the instructions in the excellent nehalist.io and Stickleback blogs. There was also some useful guidance on the HugeServer knowledgebase. I think ultimately the problem was that the Ghost commandline interface (ghost-cli) wasn't designed for Centos 7.