To build your own static GitHub Pages with Ghost, just follow these steps.
Install Node.js
Ghost is written in Node.js, so you will need the Node.js runtime.
brew install node
brew install wget
Download and Install Ghost
Check for the latest version of Ghost from Ghost.org
mkdir ghost
cd ghost
wget --no-check-certificate https://ghost.org/zip/ghost-0.5.2.zip
unzip ghost-0.5.2.zip
npm install --production
Start Ghost
npm start
Login to Ghost
open http://localhost:2368/ghost
Create an account, read the intial blog post how to edit with Markdown etc.
Create your GitHub Pages repo
See the GitHub Pages Basics Documentation for details.
You must use the username/username.github.io naming scheme. The repo name must be lower case even if your username has upper case letters.
Install Buster
With the tool Buster you can export the Ghost blogs into static pages. First we install Buster with:
brew install python
sudo pip install buster
Prepare static folder
I have placed the static folder for Buster inside my Ghost installation. So I just cloned my username/username.github.io repo with a target directory name like this:
git clone git@github.com:username/username.github.io.git static
Write Blog posts
Now your setup is complete and you can start writing Blog posts in Ghost.
Export Ghost with Buster
All published blog posts could be exported to the static folder with Buster.
buster generate --domain=http://localhost:2368
buster preview
open http://localhost:9000
The output of Buster could be previewed on port 9000.
Deploy to GitHub Pages
buster deploy
This will add, commit and push all files in the static folder to your GitHub repo.
For the initial push, please wait up to 10 minutes until GitHub deploys your subdomain.
All upcoming pushes are much faster and you can see your static Ghost blog posts on https://username.github.io
Write new Blog posts
To write new Blog posts or update the existing ones, just start Ghost, edit, then generate and deploy the static pages.
cd ghost
npm start
buster deploy
The sed commands will fix the share links from localhost to your correct GitHub pages URL.
That's it.
Fixing links
Update It seems that buster has problems fixing all hyperlinks. So I made this script that works for me:
#!/bin/bash
buster generate --domain=http://127.0.0.1:2368
find static -name *.html -type f -exec sed -i '' 's#http://localhost:2368#https://stefanscherer.github.io#g' {} \;
buster deploy
This will generate the new pages, fix all links and then deploy them on GitHub.