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Creating a Ghost site using Openstack-Flex

Creating a Ghost site with Openstack-Flex

Welcome! In this blog post we are going over using Openstack-Flex to deploy Ghost. If you havent used ghost before and would like more information about it please visit their website using the link here

Getting Started

First you will need to set up your clouds.yaml file to be able to complete the next steps. More information about that can be found here.

Creating our Openstack-Flex Server

First we are going to create our Flex router.

openstack  --os-cloud {cloud_name} router create flex-router

Second we are we wil create our flex network

openstack  --os-cloud {cloud_name} network create flex-network

Next we are going to set our router's external gateway to PUBLICNET to grant access to the internet.

openstack  --os-cloud {cloud_name} router set --external-gateway PUBLICNET flex-router

Now we are going to set up our subnet, you can choose between ipv4 and ipv6. The ip range is also up to you. For the DNS name server you will need to ping cachens1.sjc3.rackspace.com and cachens2.sjc3.rackspace.com.

ping cachens1.sjc3.rackspace.com -c2
ping cachens2.sjc3.rackspace.com -c2

openstack  --os-cloud {cloud_name} subnet create --ip-version 4 --subnet-range 172.18.107.0/24 --dns-nameserver 216.109.154.188 --dns-nameserver 216.109.154.189 --network flex-network flex-subnet

Connect the subnet to our flex-router

openstack --os-cloud {cloud_name} router add subnet flex-router flex-subnet

Now we need to create our security group, this is the group which specify the network access rules. For our example we are only going to allow SSH access.

openstack --os-cloud {cloud_name} security group create flex-sg

openstack --os-cloud {cloud_name} security group rule create --ingress --remote-ip 0.0.0.0/0 --dst-port 22 --protocol tcp flex-sg

Now we need to create our floating ip.

Note

Save this ip for later we will need to connect it to our server.

openstack --os-cloud {cloud_name} floating ip create --subnet PUBLICNET_SUBNET PUBLICNET

Now we are going to create our Public and Private ssh keys so we can securely connect to our server. I am naming my key wordpress-key

ssh-keygen
This will prompt you store and name your private key. I did something like this /home/{username}/.ssh/flex-key.

After that we will create our public key using the command below then we will assign it using the the openstack cli tools.

ssh-keygen -f ~/.ssh/flex-key -y > ~/.ssh/flex-key.pub
openstack —os-cloud {cloud_name} keypair create --public-key ~/.ssh/flex-key.pub flex-key

Now we create our server! This should include the flavor you'd like to use, the image, memory, network, key-name, and security group for this example.

 openstack --os-cloud {cloud_name} server create --flavor m1.medium --image Ubuntu-22.04 --boot-from-volume 40 --network flex-network --key-name flex-key --security-group flex-sg flex-server

Assigning our floating ip. We can do this by adding it to our port for the server. If you get the fixed ip from our newly create server you can find the port ID by searching through the port list.

openstack --os-cloud {cloud_name} port list
openstack --os-cloud {cloud_name} floating ip set --port {port id} {floating-ip}

SSH into your new Server!

ssh -i ~/.ssh/flex-key ubuntu@{floating-ip}

Deploying our Ghost website on our Openstack-Flex server

Once we have created our Openstack-Flex Server we will want to make sure everything is up to date.

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade -y

Next we need to install nginx

sudo apt-get install nginx
Next we need to enable nginx

sudo systemctl enable nginx

Start nginx

sudo systemctl start nginx

Next we install Mysql

sudo apt install mysql-server
sudo mysql_secure_installation

Next we need to use mysql and create our wordpress database with our username and password. Please create your own personal username and password.

sudo mysql

CREATE DATABASE ghost-db;
CREATE USER 'openstack-flex'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'pass';
GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON ghost-db.* TO 'openstack-flex'@'localhost';
FLUSH PRIVILEGES;
EXIT;

Next step is to install Node.js

curl -fsSL https://deb.nodesource.com/setup_18.x | sudo bash -

sudo apt install nodejs

Our last step is to install Ghost

sudo npm install ghost-cli@latest -g


sudo mkdir -p /var/www/directory-name
sudo chown -R {username}:{username} /var/www/ghost/
sudo chmod -R 755 /var/www/ghost/
cd /var/www/ghost

ghost install

Answer the configuration question and when that is complete you can reach the setup page for your website. It should look like this.

alt text