Ghost CMS: Headless Publishing Platform on Kubernetes

What Is Ghost?

Ghost is a professional publishing platform built on Node.js — 48K+ GitHub stars. It powers publications from NASA to Cloudflare.

Ghost vs WordPress

Architecture

┌─────────────────────────────────────────┐
│              Ghost Platform             │
│                                         │
│  ┌───────────────┐  ┌───────────────┐  │
│  │  Admin Panel  │  │  Content API  │  │
│  │  (write/edit) │  │  (headless)   │  │
│  └───────┬───────┘  └───────┬───────┘  │
│          │                   │          │
│          └─────────┬─────────┘          │
│                    │                    │
│           ┌────────▼────────┐           │
│           │   Ghost Core    │           │
│           │   (Node.js)     │           │
│           └────────┬────────┘           │
│                    │                    │
│           ┌────────▼────────┐           │
│           │     MySQL       │           │
│           └─────────────────┘           │
│                                         │
│  Built-in: Newsletter, Members,        │
│  Payments (Stripe), Themes, SEO        │
└─────────────────────────────────────────┘

Kubernetes Deployment

apiVersion: apps/v1
kind: Deployment
metadata:
  name: ghost
  namespace: cms
spec:
  replicas: 1  # Ghost doesn't support multi-replica without shared storage
  template:
    spec:
      containers:
        - name: ghost
          image: ghost:5-alpine
          ports:
            - containerPort: 2368
          env:
            - name: url
              value: "https://blog.yourdomain.com"
            - name: database__client
              value: "mysql"
            - name: database__connection__host
              value: "mysql.cms.svc"
            - name: database__connection__user
              value: "ghost"
            - name: database__connection__password
              valueFrom:
                secretKeyRef:
                  name: ghost-secrets
                  key: db-password
            - name: database__connection__database
              value: "ghost"
            - name: mail__transport
              value: "SMTP"
            - name: mail__options__host
              value: "smtp.mailgun.org"
          volumeMounts:
            - name: content
              mountPath: /var/lib/ghost/content
          resources:
            requests:
              memory: "256Mi"
              cpu: "200m"
            limits:
              memory: "1Gi"
      volumes:
        - name: content
          persistentVolumeClaim:
            claimName: ghost-content

Headless Mode (Content API)

Use Ghost as a headless CMS with any frontend (Astro, Next.js, Nuxt):

// Fetch posts from Ghost Content API
const response = await fetch(
  'https://blog.yourdomain.com/ghost/api/content/posts/?key=YOUR_CONTENT_API_KEY&include=tags,authors&limit=10'
);
const { posts } = await response.json();

// Each post has HTML content, meta, images
posts.forEach(post => {
  console.log(post.title, post.html, post.feature_image);
});

Astro Integration

// src/lib/ghost.ts
import GhostContentAPI from '@tryghost/content-api';

const api = new GhostContentAPI({
  url: 'https://blog.yourdomain.com',
  key: import.meta.env.GHOST_CONTENT_API_KEY,
  version: 'v5.0',
});

export async function getPosts() {
  return await api.posts.browse({limit: 'all', include: ['tags', 'authors']});
}

Built-In Monetization

Ghost includes native membership + Stripe payments:

• Free tier — email newsletter subscribers
• Paid tier — gated content, premium posts
• Tiered pricing — multiple subscription levels
• No platform fees — just Stripe’s 2.9% + $0.30

Use Cases

Related Articles

• Listmonk: Open-Source Email Newsletter
• Plausible: Privacy-First Analytics
• Coolify: Deploy Anything Self-Hosted