I published a template on Railway with which you can deploy a Ghost blog with minimal configuration. Check it out here:

Deploy Ghost on Railway
Deploy Ghost to Railway with ease. Almost no configuration needed.

In the post in which I announced that I would be learning in public, I said I wanted to do more open-source contributions. Well, this might not be an open-source contribution, but it is something very similar.

I published a template on Railway with which you can deploy a Ghost instance with ease and minimal configuration. Bringing this together did take a lot less time than I expected, actually. Let me explain what Railway is, what Ghost is, how I went about creating this template, and my key learnings.

Railway

Railway is a platform-as-a-service product that lets developers deploy servers with ease. It is built to make it trivial to get servers in the air. With its pay-as-you-go pricing model, it is one of the most transparent and ergonomic services I've used to get my servers running. Just provide your source code in any form, like a GitHub repository or a Docker image, and Railway will take care of the rest.

Railway
Railway is an infrastructure platform where you can provision infrastructure, develop with that infrastructure locally, and then deploy to the cloud.

Ghost

Ghost is the blogging platform running the very blog you are reading right now. Its core value is "independent publishing", which is why Ghost provides the source code of its platform for free. I fetched a Docker image containing the latest version of Ghost, fed it to Railway, and got on my way within half an hour. The setup I used to run this blog formed the basis of the template I published on Railway.

Ghost: The best open source blog & newsletter platform
Beautiful, modern publishing with email newsletters and paid subscriptions built-in. Used by Platformer, 404Media, Lever News, Tangle, The Browser, and thousands more.

Closing thoughts

I hope I have been able to save anybody some time by sharing this template with them. If you are one of the users, please let me know what you think! I'm happy I was able to do some form of open-source contribution this close to my initial post. Onto the next one!