Blog Migration Notes

My SSL certificate expired at the end of last month. And I lost the private key of my EC2 instance by chance. As I didn't want renew the SSL certificate and my amazon account is running out of credit, I decide to migrate my blog to vultr. I keep a migration notes here, so the migration will be more efficient next time.

• Step 1: Back up blog data.
  As my blog is backed by Ghost, I exported blog data in its control panel and got a json file.
• Step 2: Install nodejs and npm on new VPS.
  Install nodejs and npm with the package manager of your distribution. Take Ubuntu for example.
  $ sudo apt-get install nodejs
$ sudo apt-get install npm
  On some versions of Debian/Ubuntu, nodejs-legacy package is required. It provides necessary symbolic links.
  $ sudo apt-get install nodejs-legacy
• Step 3: Install Ghost.
  Download Ghost and unzip it.
  $ curl -L https://ghost.org/zip/ghost-latest.zip -o ghost.zip
$ unzip -uo ghost.zip -d /var/www/ghost
  Now install dependency for Ghost.
  $ cd /var/www/ghost && npm install --production
• Step 4: Configure Ghost.
  Create config.js.
  $ cd /var/www/ghost && cp config.example.js config.js
  Substitute domain name in production section with your own. If you don't need mail service, leave the mail brackets blank. If you do, Mailgun is recommended.
• Step 5: Make Ghost run.
  $ npm start --production works fine surely. But if you log out from SSH, ghost will stop running. forever give us a way to run Ghost as a service.
  $ npm install forever -g
$ NODE_ENV=production forever start index.js
• Step 6: Obtain a SSL certificate.
  Let's Encrypt provides free SSL certificate. Detailed information can be found at https://letsencrypt.org/.
  Since Let's Encrypt certificate only last for 90 days, I add a line to crontab to auto renew certificate.
  0 6 * * 1 certbot renew
• Step 7: Reverse proxy with nginx.
  By default, Ghost runs on port 2368. It's not recommend to run Ghost directly on port 80 for security concerns. We should run Ghost with a web server and proxy the access of port 80 to port 2368. I prefer nginx.
  Create a configuration file for ghost and create a symbolic link.
  $ touch /etc/nginx/sites-available/ghost.conf
$ sudo ln -s /etc/nginx/sites-available/ghost.conf /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/ghost.conf
  Here's my ghost.conf, it contains SSL configuration.

server {
    listen 80;
    server_name shunix.com;

    location / {
        return 301 https://$server_name$request_uri;
    }
}

server {
    server_name www.shunix.com;
    return 301 $scheme://shunix.com$request_uri;
}

server {
     listen 443 ssl;
     server_name shunix.com;

     root /var/www/ghost;
     index index.html index.htm;
     client_max_body_size 10G;

     location / {
         proxy_pass http://localhost:2368;
         proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
         proxy_set_header Host $http_host;
         proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-Proto $scheme;
         proxy_buffering off;
     }
     ssl on;
     ssl_certificate /etc/letsencrypt/live/shunix.com/fullchain.pem;
     ssl_certificate_key /etc/letsencrypt/live/shunix.com/privkey.pem;
     ssl_prefer_server_ciphers On;
     ssl_protocols TLSv1 TLSv1.1 TLSv1.2;
     ssl_ciphers ECDH+AESGCM:DH+AESGCM:ECDH+AES256:DH+AES256:ECDH+AES128:DH+AES:ECDH+3DES:DH+3DES:RSA+AESGCM:RSA+AES:RSA+3DES:!aNULL:!MD5:!DSS;
 }

• Step 8: Change A record to point to new IP address.
• Step 9: Setup account and import data.

Till now, we have complete the migration, the new blog should be online.